Thread by @bgolus

I was talking to my Dad about flight delays and staffing issues, and my dad pointed out a problem I'd missed entirely.

There are no new pilots.

When the pandemic hit, passenger airlines in the US laid off all their pilots. If those pilots were within 5, maybe 10 years of retiring, they mostly decided to retire early.

Fast forward to now and the airlines are trying to hire back all those pilots, who are responding 🖕

So they're trying to hire new pilots instead. But there's a problem with that. There's no such thing as "new pilots" that you can just hire.

Airliner pilots come from two main career paths. One is rich kids who can afford to pay for flight training and either own or rent planes to fly, and rack up at least 1,500 hours in the air flying. That's very expensive. And that's minimum to become a copilot.

The other way is via the military. The vast majority of airline pilots in the US are ex navy or air force.

But there's the big problem. The military isn't training many aircraft pilots anymore, they're training drone pilots.

Drone pilots never leave the ground, and as such any "flight time" they might have doesn't count towards that 1500 hour requirement. Just like simulator training doesn't count.

And thus, the pool of new pilots has disappeared. This happened a while ago, but it hadn't yet become a big problem for airlines because their (aging) pilot workforces were flying for longer.

But they just laid off all those older pilots, and they aren't coming back.

To make things worse, to become the primary pilot of an airliner requires a ton of hours flying as a copilot. And the pilots that did remain are either the younger ones that still aren't full pilots and are still copilots, or are getting close to looking to retire too.

Basically, airlines are fucked in the next decade, because there won't be enough pilots left in the world unless they bite the bullet and start paying to train new pilots themselves. Something they absolutely don't want to do because it's expensive!