Interesting to compare the (admittedly few) well considered responses on this thread to the almost frenzied response (from both camps) this same post generated on the Dununda & Godzone page only 24 hours earlier. (Take a look there and perhaps take a not too comforting peek at our “Next Generation’s” attitude to his/their career.)
My fear is pretty well exactly what ‘ornithopter’ said – I fear the drying up of the supply of committed young aviators capable of doing the job as the job becomes less and less attractive thanks to the ‘death of a thousand cuts’ it is currently suffering at the hands of ‘bright’(!) MBAs who can’t look further ahead than the next six monthly statement. With the deepening reduction in conditions we are seeing worldwide, we will one day see a situation where the job becomes so unattractive that there won’t be enough youngsters out there with the qualifications and the qualities that are required to fill the job today.
So what will the companies do? They’ll lower - or to use a less emotive word, ‘amend’ - the minimum standard required to fill the seats. I know there’ll be people ready to protest loudly that there’ll never be a pilot shortage, and I accept that they’re probably right. However, it’s not a ‘pilot shortage’ per se that I fear, it’s a shortage of what we in the profession class as a pilot today. I fear that if the companies can’t find pilots, they’ll employ people who will not have the skills or experience to do the job without the automatics, so they’ll re-tailor the job where using the automatics all the time becomes mandatory. (You can almost hear the conversation from here: “We don’t really need pilots anymore. What we need is I.T. graduates to monitor the computers. After all, these pilots, all they do is operate computers, don’t they?”)
From there, it’s a short step to the job becoming a clone of the inner city train drivers of today who do no more than open and close the doors. I hear some saying that you’ll always have to have someone capable of manually flying the aircraft, but will you? If there’s not enough people out there with the skills required, the bean counters will be able to prove that it will be cheaper to suffer delays every ‘n’ thousand flights when the degraded automatics demand a cancellation or a diversion where a costly pilot could have completed the flight. The same argument could be made about it being ‘cheaper’ to suffer a hull loss every ‘n’ years than it would be to train pilots to the degree required to reach the standards we today accept as a minimum.
I can see it going the way of the merchant marine. After twenty years, someone will see they may have made a mistake, (as I understand they have acknowledged in the shipping industry), but by then, it will be too late.