Qantas can find plenty of pilots... for the time being. There is no shortage of suitable applicants at mainline. There is a training pipeline issue and mis management dating back to 2014 in terms of gearing up for the arrival of new aeroplanes. This has been exacerbated as well by an increase of flying of the 737 fleet by 14% and the A330 fleet by 25%. That’s the equivalent of 9 extra 737s and 7 extra A330s. That is 65ish extra 737 crews and close to 60 extra A330 crews (plus S/Os). 250- 300 extra pilots in the pipeline before we start thinking about attrition (which is starting to increase as a result of the demographic) and expansion with the 787.
That the training bottleneck has happened is an indictment on somone but I cant work out who specifically. Who would know. Nice thing about bureaucracies I guess.
Originally Posted by
dragon man
It’s my belief it’s actually worse than everyone thinks, they don’t even have enough TREs next bid period on the 330 to do recurrent training for the available line pilots. Hence the same as the 737 they can’t do any promotional training. To think this problem will be resolved in one bid period is delusional, I would think one year minimum.
Pretty sure the A330 TREs can manage the current recurrent load. They can’t handle the recurrent load, promotional load and training of new CAT Ds and TREs. Hence the training slowdown on both fleets to pump out more Cat Ds and TREs which will then enable a greater throughput of trainees. Agree on your time frame.