Steve Creedy still regurgitating management spin - when will he do some research?
Regionals suffer in pilot shortage
Steve Creedy | February 29, 2008
THE pilot shortage has raised fears about the loss of valuable experience from the cockpits of the nation's regional airlines.
QantasLink this week became the latest regional carrier to announce route cuts, saying it would suspend flights in NSW and Queensland because of higher than normal pilot attrition.
But Regional Express, which says it has been experiencing an annualised attrition rate of 60 per cent, has also been forced to announce service suspensions and cancellations.
Both airlines have instituted programs to train replacement pilots but there are worries that these are less experienced than the older hands they replace.
Virgin Blue chief executive Brett Godfrey has raised the issue with the federal Government at the departmental and ministerial levels and union officials have also voiced concerns.
Mr Godfrey said at last week's half-yearly Virgin results that the pool of pilots with qualifications well in excess of minimum requirements had dropped as a result of the skills shortage.
He said a pilot shortage meant rural pilots and those on regional aircraft were coming through flying schools and progressing more quickly than ever before.
"I'm not saying it's unsafe," he said. "I'm just saying we are at a point where we don't want to end up pushing them too quickly."
Australian Federation of Air Pilots senior industrial officer Lawrie Cox said the "quick turnaround endorsements" being offered by regional airlines would not get them the experience they needed. He said experienced captains were walking away from regional carriers because they had had enough of poor pay and deteriorating conditions.
"Potentially you've got a short-term employee who has got very minimal hours being given a command on an aircraft type ... and then a brand new employee sitting beside him in the right-hand seat," Mr Cox said.
"That's a recipe for disaster in our view and that's the sort of consequence we've got concerns about because they're the people who are going to end up in trouble."
Australia's concerns echo international fears of a skills shortfall as the industry continues to grow. The International Air Transport Association's director of operations, Juergen Haacker, said recently that some airlines were offering captain's positions based on entry levels that were less than half what was normally considered the accepted minimum flight time.
Mr Haacker told Orient Aviation magazine that the IATA was monitoring air safety incidents that appeared to have occurred because of inexperience on the flight deck. "We are carefully monitoring what is going on ... it is a trend we are certainly seeing and, especially in combination with an inexperienced co-pilot on the same plane, it is definitely not a trend we would like to see," Mr Haacker said.
Mr Cox said the airlines would have to decide how they were going to attract and retain pilots on decent packages to keep experience levels high enough.
If they did not do this, he would expect the Transport Department and the Civil Aviation Safety Authority to become concerned at the risk levels.
"The risk profile is obviously climbing dramatically," he said.
The union official said the problem had been around for some time but the airlines had been compensating by trimming routes.
He said more experienced pilots in the past had made a lifestyle decision to stay with regional carriers. But he said the regionals were changing their work practices so that they were more like the bigger airlines.
"That's why pilots are walking out of the door of the regionals," Mr Cox said. "They're not being poached, they're just saying they're going to make a career decision because their lifestyle has changed."
Executives from the bigger airlines said last week they had yet to be hurt by the shortage, despite moves by overseas airlines to recruit in Australia.
Mr Godfrey said Virgin, which lost about seven pilots but took on 140 in the first half, was not affected. He said Virgin's minimum requirement for Boeing 737 pilots was 2000 hours - 500 hours higher than the minimum required by CASA, and it had 400 pilot applications on its books.
Qantas CEO Geoff Dixon acknowledged that QantasLink had an issue with pilots but said it was confined to the regional carrier.
"Qantas, contrary to a lot of the publicity at the moment, has an attrition rate right at this moment for pilots of just on or maybe a little bit below 3 per cent," Mr Dixon said.
"That is a very, very low attrition rate," Mr Dixon added. "We do have a specific issue with QantasLink which is being worked through with some strategies that (Qantas executive general manager) John Borghetti and Narendra Kumar, who runs QantasLink, have devised."
Mr Dixon said the airline's new pilot training school, which started last month, would end up training about 3000 pilots for Qantas, and for other airlines on top of that, over the next five to 10 years.
CASA spokesman Peter Gibson said pilot training was based on demonstrated competency and airline pilots were subjected to regular checks and training.
Mr Gibson said an airline pilot was required to have a total of 1500 hours, with 250 as pilot-in-command, and undertake 21.5 hours of theory exams with a pass mark of 70 per cent.
"The bar's set pretty high and there's certainly no question of reducing the level of that bar," he said. "And of course, the higher up you go in your licence category, the more regular your proficiency checks.
"So although people might be saying new airline pilots coming through may have less hours than they did five or 10 years ago, their level of ability is what we're testing and remains at the same high standard."