Future pilot supply for the airlines
Airlines seem to be starting to order aircraft in respectable numbers again after a period in which cancellations or postponements dominated. The Emirates order in June for another 32
Airbus A380s - bringing its planned
A380 fleet to 90 aircraft - is the most spectacular of a steady stream of new contracts.
As orders accelerate, however, less thought seems to have been given to who is going to fly the new aeroplanes. Hardware requires skilled "liveware" to operate it, but airlines seem to be assuming that appropriately qualified pilots will just materialise as required.
Although Watt acknowledges that there is little demand for low-hour pilots among western European airlines, apart from the big low-cost carriers such as Ryanair and EasyJet, eastern Europe is hiring, and so is Asia. Any recent graduate from ab initio training can find a job somewhere in the world if he/she is willing to travel, he says.
The evidence of the looming global need is there for all to see. The current firm order backlog for the global airline industry stands at well over 7,500 aircraft, as listed by Flightglobal's Insight Fleetwatch from its ACAS database, and although a few monthly cancellations still feature, they are now dramatically outnumbered by new orders.
Boeing forecasts a global need for 448,000 new airline pilots to enter the industry over the next 20 years, and more than half a million new maintenance engineers. But many carriers are performing no pilot and engineer supply planning.
Long-term forecast demand for airline pilots and mechanics is significantly higher than it was before the global economic recession, according to new figures from Boeing's Training and Flight Services division.
The company estimates that the average annual airline pilot demand for the next 20 years will be for 22,500 new pilots and 28,000 new mechanics to replace those retiring, and to cope with growth in the global airline fleet. Just two years ago in 2008, the Training and Flight Services division's forbear, Alteon, forecast that the average annual
global industry needs for the 20 years from 2007 would be 18,000 pilots and 24,000 maintenance engineers.
North America heads the league in terms of the number of pilots it will need in the next two decades, at 112,000 (forecast by Alteon in 2008 at 98,000) and Europe follows at 97,000 (70,000). Other regional predicted requirements are China 61,000 (49,900), South-East Asia and Indonesia 34,000 (32,000), Latin America 32,000 (22,800), north-east Asia 19,000 (19,000), the Middle East 23,000 (17,500), the CIS 20,700 (11,500), Africa 13,200 (10,100) and Oceania 13,000 (7,200).
Boeing's projection of the totals for the next 20 years brings home the size of the task: the need to train 448,000 pilots and more than half a million mechanics. This raises the question as to whether the training infrastructure to meet demand can be created in time following the slump in airline investment in ab initio training since the recession began, which has seen capacity in the flight training sector reducing, and investment at flight training organisations put on hold.