That's not the problem they're facing, GMDS. There are sufficient (though not plentiful!!) qualified applicants. What there isn't is capacity to train them
Wiz
I apologize to all prop drivers. It's not that i think they couldn't do the job. It's just: Give a average Joe 18 instead of 4 wheels and he will need an awful lot of training and exercise to master it.
You state that there are plentiful of qualified applicants. Well, there we disagree. With qualified i mean that they can be handed off online with simply a conversion, be it type or sops. This is barely sufficient with the mostly RJ experienced freshmen we get. They are not bad aviators, but out of their league for a (too) long time, until they build up experience on heavies with swept wings. Energy management problems all over (same goes for many DECs).
Retention, rather than recruitment, will become the critical factor in the next year or so, so EK just might start coming up with some "inovative" ways of persuading people to stay
Spot on! This will cause some heavy pain to a number of our mismanagement desk astronauts because their retention happened somewhere else up to now .....