With widespread flight cancellations and delays angering hundreds of thousands of customers, airlines are desperately looking for ways to combat the issue. Now, some of those in the industry are calling on the the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to loosen age limits and training requirements for pilots to combat the labor shortage.
Republic Airways, a regional carrier that runs flights for American
"The FAA fully understands the intent of Congress when it established the 1,500-hour requirement and supports the safety goal it set out to achieve," the FAA said in a statement. "While anyone can request an exemption, it does not mean it will be granted."
Along with the petition from Republic, Republican South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham has discussed raising the mandatory retirement cut-off for pilots from 65 to at least 67 through congressional legislation.
"We have a crisis when it comes to airline travel," Graham of South Carolina said at Greenville-Spartanburg airport in SC. "We have a pilot shortage and those who say we don't, well, they're just full of it."
According to the Regional Airline Associations, roughly one third of all current airline pilots are in their fifties, and more than one-in-ten will reach retirement age in the next five years.
"Pilots will be aged out, not because they're unsafe, just simply because they reach 65," says Graham. "My legislation would allow pilots to continue to fly if they meet the qualifications. We're not dumbing down anything."
Pilot advocates disagree with Graham and the airline carriers about what's to blame for the flight cancellations, and they especially disagree about how to address the issue. While labor advocates acknowledge that there is a shortage of pilots, they say airlines caused the high number of retirements that contributed to that shortage.
"There's a shortage of plans. Management did not plan for this recovery," said American Airlines Captain Dennis Tajer, a spokesperson for the Allied Pilots Association. "To save money, they incentivized pilots to retire early and they never started training the pilots that would fill those seats."
A press release from the pilots union Air Lines Pilots Association (ALPA) also criticised Graham's proposed legislation, with the union writing that the proposal is a "misguided attempt to solve a problem that doesn't exist."
"This legislation is yet another attempt to distract the conversation from the real issue, which is that some U.S. airlines have clearly failed to plan for the industry's comeback that we are experiencing today," ALPA President, Captain Joe DePete, is quoted in the release.
DePete added that Graham's legislation "would only increase costs for airlines as well as introduce unnecessary risks to passengers and crew alike." In fact, some large airlines have come out against Graham's proposal due to the difficulty of implementing such a change. For instance, pilots over the age of 65 would be allowed to fly in the U.S., but not on overseas routes.
"Look, these retirement ages are there for a reason and the reason is safety. I'm not going to be on board with anything that could compromise safety," Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said on Fox News. "The answer is not to keep the baby boomer generation in the cockpit indefinitely. The answer is to make sure that we have as many and as good pilots ready to take their place; to have a stronger pipeline."
Amidst the coronavirus pandemic, the number of pilots working in the industry dropped due to a combination of factors, from training interruptions and fewer new hires to a surge in early retirements triggered by the drop in demand for air travel.
Cumulatively, major airlines in the U.S. are aiming to hire and train 12,000 new pilots in 2022. That's the highest number of new pilots ever hired in a single year, more than twice the previous record, according to pilot pay consultant Kit Darby. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that airlines will need to bring on 14,500 new pilots every year for the next ten years to make up the shortage.
Already, many big airlines are no longer requiring that potential pilots have a four-year degree, some are offering special visas to recruit pilots from Australia, and training programs are being rethought. However, these efforts probably aren't even going to make a dent in the shortage of available pilots.
"The pilot shortage for the industry is real, and most airlines are simply not going to be able to realize their capacity plans because there simply aren't enough pilots, at least not for the next five-plus years," said United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby on a call with investors in April.
According to Kirby, United's regional airlines currently have around 150 planes stuck on the ground because there aren't enough pilots to fly them.
"There are approximately 500 fewer regional aircraft operating today than at the end of 2019," Drew Lemos with the Regional Airlines Association says. "This represents a loss of a quarter of the regional fleet. Five-hundred parked aircraft equates to a deficiency of approximately 5,000 pilots."
Regional carriers in small cities, where pay for pilots is usually lower, have been hit the hardest by the shortage. Major carriers with higher pay packages are scooping up the available pilots in those areas, leaving the smaller carriers with no options.
According to small carrier Mesa Air Group
"We never fathomed attrition levels like this. If we don't fly our airplanes we lose money. You saw our quarterly numbers," Ornstein said, referring to the company's second-quarter reported loss of roughly $43 million.
