As usual, these pilot shortage debates have gotten wildly out of hand with many contrasting views. Let me try and clear up a few things for us.
There is a large shortage of qualified pilots with plenty of hours and who are type rated on the aircraft the employer flies. Just take a look at all of the ads in the back of FI every week.
However this does not automatically mean that there is a genuine shortage of ab-initio guys. There are hundreds been churned out of FTE, Oxford etc every month. IMHO, some companies do not like to take guys like this and prefer to be involved with their training right from the beginning. A few companies have started this type of scheme but no-one has really ventured towards sponsorship yet.
One example i know of is Cityjet who are sending guys down to South Africa, and visit them every few months to check up on them. They also have a say in exactly how they are trained. For example, Cityjet ensured that the newbies were flying within a week of starting training unlike many other schools which do a lot of ground school first. Cityjet have also agreed to
SPONSOR the new guys type rating, which clearly shows that they are worried another company may snap these guys up once their fully trained possibly hinting that they may find it hard to keep pilots.
Based on this i believe we are at the very start of a bright period for pilot recruitment and barring any major world events the industry should keep on growing.
However, i believe that we can only say that there is a TRUE pilot shortage when Airlines need to offer sponsorship schemes in order to attract employees!
Flyerire.
