After nearly a four-year drought of job openings, the airline industry is on the brink of what’s predicted to be the biggest surge in pilot hiring in history. Aircraft maker Boeing has forecast a need for 466,650 more commercial pilots by 2029 — an average of 23,300 new pilots a year. Nearly 40% of the openings will be to meet the soaring travel market in the Asia-Pacific region, Boeing predicts, but more than 97,000 will be in North America.
“It is a dramatic turnaround,” says Louis Smith, president of FltOps.com, a website that provides career and financial planning for pilots. “Pilot hiring was severely depressed in the last three years. The next 10 years will be the exact opposite, with the longest and largest pilot hiring boom in the history of the industry.”
The demand for pilots will be so great that the industry could ultimately face a shortage, sparking fierce competition among airlines across the globe vying for candidates qualified to fill their cockpits. Where is our pipeline of new pilots going to come from, and how are we going to finance them?”
The hiring surge is being fueled by several factors:
Across the USA, the need for pilots will be sparked by increasing passenger demand, and perhaps most significantly, an exodus of senior pilots that is expected to start next year, as a large wave of pilots hits the age of 65, which is the mandatory retirement age for airline pilots under federal law.
As worldwide competition for pilots begins to heat up, some overseas carriers are making dramatic overtures to fill their cockpits. Emirates, the Dubai-based carrier, will hire more than 500 pilots by April 2012, says Michael Keating, the airline’s flight crew resourcing specialist. The carrier already employs roughly 300 Americans as pilots, and is visiting job fairs in New York City and Las Vegas to seek candidates.
The compensation package for these pilots includes perks such as a chauffeur-driven car to and from work, an education allowance for the pilot’s family, and profit sharing.
The average starting salary for a pilot at a regional carrier is roughly $21,000 a year, while the most senior captain, flying the largest plane at a major airline, typically makes more than $186,000 a year, according to FltOps.com.
Sean Cassidy, a pilot for Alaska Airlines and first vice president of the Air Line Pilots Association International, which represents more than 53,000 pilots in the USA and Canada, says that “whether or not we can meet the pilot hiring needs domestically depends on how robust the hiring process is and how lucrative it is to attract new entrants into the industry, especially at the regional level.”
Source: USA Today/Travel
