Pilot-hungry airlines raiding flight schools to meet demands
Airlines’ insatiable demand for pilots threatens to sabotage flight schools’ ability to train new ones. Carriers are raising wages and hoarding every available pilot — including the instructors schools rely on to teach incoming students.
The very pilot pipeline that is supposed to meet decades of projected labor shortfalls is being squeezed. According to a report from the Government Accountability Office, some schools have been forced to scale back operations or turn down qualified students because they do not have enough instructors.
Michael Farley has been teaching at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts for 18 years. Applications for his program are up, but the aviation department chair is so short on instructors that he has had to cap the number of students in his program.
“In my tenure, this is unprecedented,” Farley said, reflecting on the speed with which airlines were hiring recent graduates.
The problem is rooted in how collegiate aviation is structured. Classroom courses such as meteorology and aviation law are taught by academic faculty, but flight instructors are usually experienced students or graduates looking to gain flight hours before heading off to the commercial big leagues.
Details vary between vocational, two-year and four-year schools, but an aspiring pilot at a typical accredited institution needs about 250 to 300 hours to become a certified instructor. Those 250 hours used to be all you needed to join an airline as a copilot. In some countries, it still is.
Since 2013, most students have had to fly between 1,000 and 1,500 hours to qualify for work at a passenger airline. Even before that, the GAO report found, airlines expected as much as 2,000 hours of
experience from entry-level employees, depending on the market.
So, where do young pilots get the other 1,000 hours or so? Some do aerial photography or fly banners, but the overwhelming majority work at their aviation college or an affiliated institution as a flight instructor. It is built into their career path.
When the model snaps
Demand for pilots swings hard. In 2009, as American families and businesses slashed their air-travel budgets amid the Great Recession and furloughs swept the industry, major airlines hired just 30 pilots, according to pilot-advisory service Fapa.aero. That number soared to 5,000 in 2017. In 2018, it will be even higher.
When the market was slow, students stuck around, and instructors were cheap and abundant. But when hiring took off, they vanished into jobs flying passenger or cargo jets.
When employers complain about worker shortages, the obvious reply is employees would not be so hard to find if businesses just offered more money.
The job market is complicated by strict federal regulations and what FAPA’S president, Louis Smith, called the “poach chain.”
Instructors are almost all flightschool students, which means they came into aviation because they wanted to sit in the cockpit of a mammoth Boeing or Airbus with “Delta” or “American” stamped on the side, not babysit their peers in a single-engine Cessna.
From Day 1, they are focused on getting to a major airline and building seniority, the all-important number that rules everything from route assignments and pay scales to standby tickets. Those major airlines poach from the regional airlines, and regional airlines poach from flight schools.
Life is hard at the bottom of the poach chain, where flight schools compete for instructors. U.S. Aviation Academy, a large training outfit that partners with Tarrant County College in Texas, offers new instructors a $2,500 bonus and between $27 and $35 an hour.
Their pay is competitive with regional airlines, where new pilots earn an estimated $50,000 to $60,000 a year. But when a 21year-old instructor gets poached, the schools are not competing with the regional carrier. They are competing with the promise of a 44-year career in a high-profile, lionized position that can pay north of $200,000 a year and offers excellent benefits.
Aspiring pilot Cade Glass, of Midlothian, Va., plans on becoming an instructor to help pay for flight school and said he has considered a career in aviation education, but the 13-year-old already understands the cold calculus involved.
“If airlines are paying like they are today, with nearly $20,000 signing bonuses? I’m going to go there every time,” Glass said.
Collateral damage
As flight schools pay instructors more, they are raising their prices to compensate. It is a fraught decision in an industry that worried it is charging too much to attract the quantity and diversity of students airlines need.
Federal student aid, while available at many aviation schools, typically does not stretch to cover flight-school costs, which are boosted by investments in aircraft, fuel and facilities — not to mention the instructors. The GAO found that most pilot programs charge more than $50,000 for flight training alone.
Glass’s first choice of flight school — Embry-riddle Aeronautical University, where he went to aviation camp and learned the ropes from student instructors — costs $48,000 a year. That does not include the cumulative $40,000 to $60,000 the school expects students to spend on flight training while they are there.
“If you don’t have the financial backing, it’s difficult,” Glass said.
Fixing the model
The quickest solution to the instructor shortage would be another downturn in the cyclical industry, which would reduce demand for new pilots and flood the market with laid-off and furloughed workers, but nobody’s advocating that. It also seems unlikely given the industry’s bullish projections that predict the pilot shortfall will extend for decades.
In the short term, schools have partnered with regional airlines and struck deals that allow pilots to earn seniority while they are instructing. They have also offered what Tom Hiltner, FAPA’S vice president of operations, called “indentured servitude packages,” in which students promise to stick around longer in exchange for advanced flight training.
Hiltner said some schools have also intensified recruitment of nontraditional instructors including retired pilots, pilots who might not meet medical restrictions for airline certification, and pilots who care less about globetrotting and more about working regular hours and sleeping in their own bed each night.