I’ve been waiting for the pilot shortage all of my life, and I think it actually arrived! The WSJ has been especially concerned, as they usually are when labor manages to clip off a toenail of wage increase from the Wall Street bull, but it really is an interesting situation. Why is there a “shortage” and what can be done about it?

First, is there really a shortage? No, and one isn’t coming. You can be flying a regional airliner 2 years from today if you have enough money. If they set the regulations back to 2013 you could be there in 6 months.  There are a lot of people that drop out of the industry at every stage so there is a large pool of inactive pilots out there. Flying is cool, so if the economics even sort of work, there is a large pool of people willing to give it a shot.

Some airline pilots are well paid, with the caveat of a very high standard deviation. The rule of thumb is 1000 times the hourly rate, which is up to $300+ per hour plus up to a 16% direct contribution to a 401k or pension. You can look up the hourly rates at Airline Pilot Central, which is fairly accurate. For a young person that makes all the correct choices and is lucky, airline pilot can be a $10+ million dollar career. How could there possibly be a shortage?

It helps if you think of airline pilot more like professional athlete than an office job. You might make a lot of money, but there are a lot of pitfalls from which it is difficult or impossible to recover. Airlines commonly file bankruptcy to shed pesky union contracts, pensions, and to cram down salaries of all their employees. They also go out of business, and if you are a captain at a liquidated airline, you don’t get hired as a captain at the next airline, you start over as a copilot with the worst possible schedule and lowest pay, just like you were 23 again. Health problem in your 6 month checkup? You’re out of work (albeit with some LTD payment that varies by airline). Regulation violation? Drunk driving? Fired and starting over or out of the industry. You can’t even take an anti-depressant to cope with your 3rd divorce brought on by being gone 15 days per month.

Airline pilot has a brutal exit rate due to the above reasons. Everyone has a backup career / side-gig to handle the furloughs, health and family issues that interrupt your career. Many find a lot of success with the backup and when trouble hits it is more advantageous to keep going with that instead of playing the pilot lottery. Mergers like the Spirit/Frontier announced today mean someone is going to get screwed, since seniority at a single airline is what governs your quality of life, from where you live, to which holidays you miss, to how much you can earn.

Training is expensive and the first jobs are miserable. Paying dues is stupid but not uncommon for many careers, aviation ramps that up to another level. Pay/borrow for college, then throw on another $100k in student loans, then you need to work as a flight instructor for $10-25 per hour for a couple years, then <$50 per hour for a few more years in an unstable regional airline. If you’ve got family money/good advice, nothing to lose, and you get the brass ring? Excellent, that math works out great and you will be wealthy. What happens if you jump for the ring and miss? You have to pay up front, the loan exists and will be paid back regardless of what you earn. What if you find you don’t have what it takes after your training is complete? What if you have a medical event? What if your spouse or family can’t handle the separation or moving/living in the city you need?

It’s fun to dump on the new generation of lazy kids of the magenta line, but I think they really are getting better advice now in terms of what careers really cost and how the downside risks play out. 50 kids borrow $100,000 each, that’s $5,000,000 of student loans. 1 or 2 of them get to a $300,000 per year career, maybe 5 more are pros elsewhere… but what happened to the others and how did they pay off their loans? Like medicine running out of primary care doctors that can do math, that information is out there now, so people with options and analytical skills look elsewhere, those left are inexperienced ones that don’t understand the risk up front (beware of airline corporate outreach, womyn and minorities). Couple that with the uncertain regulatory environment surrounding automation (single pilot aircraft) and sizable increases in experience required for each level of the job and it makes sense to think very carefully about your personal risk tolerance before signing that loan doc and jumping into the cockpit.

How I suspect things will play out: 1) mergers of ULCC’s 2) no mergers but a few more mainline bankruptcies 3) retirement age raised to 67 4) collapse/consolidation of regional model so fewer on larger mainline aircraft 5) the 1500 hour rule will be reduced again via loophole.  I don’t expect single-pilot passenger operations in the next 20 years, but after that who knows.

tldr; It’s just clickbait.  Airline life is high risk/high reward, the road to wide body captain with the big paycheck is littered with the bodies of those that were unlucky or just couldn’t cut it. Middle class people don’t shoot for pro baseball player anymore, same with airline pilots.