Aspiring airline pilots begin this new year of 2024 with a lot on the line, both personally and financially. Lured by the promise of earning six-figure salaries flying sexy jets on autopilot a few days a month, thousands of mostly Gen Z-ers are flocking to flight schools all over the country, including ours. Many will spend $100,000 or more to go “zero to hero” at a “career track” flight school, and possibly double or triple that to also earn a potentially useless bachelor’s degree in the process. Most will take out fat loans to pay for it all. After that, these young pilots will spend another year or two grinding it out as a flight instructor, teaching other twentysomethings how to do the same thing they just did. Most of them have likely never taught anybody to do anything before, unless if perhaps they were a camp counselor. Most of these pilots don’t really don’t want to instruct, but they do it anyway because it’s the easiest way to get paid while building flight time, and it looks good on a resume. Considering the fact that there’s now a better than 76 percent chance of passing the flight instructor practical test on the first try compared to 68 percent just 10 years ago (see screen shot below of this article), it’s a pretty good bet.
Here at Holladay Aviation, a student can expect to spend about $50,000 to earn a flight instructor certificate, including all the prerequisite certificates and ratings. We have a small handful of students on our roster right now who are pursuing their commercial and CFI certificates, and each of them has been told in no uncertain terms that we can’t guarantee them an instructing job when and if they make it through our rigorous program.
Many young pilots today are operating with the throttle wide open, racing each other to the magic 1,500-hour mark much like Americans scrambled west during the California gold rush. Historically, when humans are competing for limited resources, we tend to throw caution to the wind, so to speak, and take risks that we might not otherwise take if resources are plentiful. Most CFIs who are building time on their way to the airlines are instructing because it’s a means to an end. There is no requirement that they enjoy instructing and by design, there is not enough time built into this system for them to really get any good at it before they leave for the airlines. Incoming student pilots likely have no frame of reference to gauge the quality of the instruction they are receiving, so quality often suffers and ineptitude gets passed from one generation to the next.
Clearly there’s a financial incentive to get hired by a regional airline as quickly as possible. The sooner you can start earning a paycheck, the sooner you can start paying back that flight training loan. But are there really enough CFI jobs out there? Is the pilot shortage real or is it being exploited as a flight school marketing tactic? The answer varies depending on who you ask. All I know is that we are training more commercial pilots than we ever have before, and I am receiving literally dozens of resumes each month from flight instructors all over the country who are looking for work. But why are the flight schools who trained them unwilling or unable to hire them? Are there not enough incoming students to support the number of instructors who are being produced?
According to the following data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the total number of airline flight operations has not yet returned to pre-COVID levels, and the percentage of flights canceled for whatever reason, including lack of sufficient staffing, is at a five-year low. If this is true, why are more pilots needed?
Meanwhile, it seems that inexperience in the cockpit, combined with fatigue in the control tower, might be setting the industry up for a really bad news headline. This happened recently, in Japan.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, air traffic control jobs are basically flatlined, despite the alleged pilot shortage and increase in air traffic.
So where does that leave us? I don’t know about you, but if I wanted a job hauling stuff long distances in a large vehicle — which is basically what airline pilots do, if we’re being completely honest about it — I might consider becoming a truck driver instead of an airline pilot. Trucking is a valuable career that you can get into much faster, and for a lot less money. If you become an owner operator and farm out the actual driving to others, you can make even more money and have more time to fly for fun, if you wanted to.
The airline industry isn’t going away, but it is very fickle compared to the trucking industry. The fact is most cargo gets around this country by truck, not by air (see below). We saw during COVID that Americans figured out how to work remotely, and many continue to do so now, four years later. People travel for fun by air. Airline travel is for the most part a luxury, not a necessity. So if families are worrying about paying the mortgage or feeding their kids, they won’t be hopping on that Delta flight to Orlando to go visit Mickey Mouse anytime soon. According to a recent article in FOX Business, “High inflation has created severe financial pressures for most U.S. households, which are forced to pay more for everyday necessities like food and rent. Food prices are up 33.7% from the start of 2021, while shelter costs are up 18.7%, according to FOX Business calculations. Energy prices, meanwhile, are up 32.8%.” Of course, it’s difficult to assess how real that data is, but as the one who does the grocery shopping for our family, I can attest to the validity of the food price increases.
Let’s face it. We’re in a precarious position as Americans right now. This is a presidential election year, and as a nation we haven’t even begun to truly reconcile what happened last time. We can’t trust the government or anything we read in the news. The government fudges economic indicators to suit their agenda, and the mainstream media outlets can’t be trusted, either. I’m currently re-reading “1984” by George Orwell, and am shocked at how well he forecasted what is happening today in America:
But actually, he thought as he readjusted the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at a hundred and forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than a hundred and forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all.
So is the pilot shortage real? Is chasing an airline job right now a good bet? What is the future of the aviation industry? Your guess is as good as mine. My advice to all of you wannabe airline pilots is to tread carefully, and have a solid backup plan. Maybe trucking?
