Trend question for Flight Deck Crews

[Allioth]

Hi everyone,
I'm thinking on starting the commercial course to frosen ATPL, but first I'd like to know if there's any internet site, or any research that can give me some future trends for employment... What will be the market request in the next few years? Is it a risk to start the courses now?

Thanks to anyone who will answer me
Bye

Allioth

[No_Speed_Restriction]

i think thats what we all asked ourselves when we started our training. a few years is a heck of a lot of time in this industry to guess.

[scroggs]

Firstly - crystal balls are in short supply, and those that are available are notoriously unreliable.

BALPA and GAPAN do attempt to forecast employment trends, but do so only in the most general terms. No one will give you anything you can hang your hat on, but here are a few points:

The airline industry is highly cyclical. It lurches from boom to bust in roughly a ten-year cycle. The spread from peak to trough exaggerates general economic trends because it is very quickly affected by any event which reduces discretionary income or affects travelling confidence, and it is slow to recover, but when it does it tends to recover very strongly - as now. The trouble is, no-one knows when the next downturn will be - and there will be one!

Airlines are not much better than you and I at forecasting when things will improve or decline, and they tend to get taken by surprise. 9/11 and SARS were exceptional events, but the industry was already turning down when these events happened. The reaction to them by airlines was instant and excessive - they got rid of 25% of capacity and manpower in weeks. Since then, they've been rebuilding and that recovery is now at full speed. You will not hear any airline accountant admit that another slowdown is inevitable and may happen soon, so order books go on increasing and we're all (at least on this side of the pond) recruiting like mad. When a slowdown is detected, the taps will turn off straight away. There will be no little or no warning, and it will take a year or two before they're reopened. When will this happen? Who knows, but an interest in the economics pages of the serious newspapers may pay dividends!

So, where does that leave you? My best guess is that we're now at or near the peak of recruiting for this cycle. We may continue recruiting at current rates for another year or so, maybe more, but the world economy will take a downswing at some point in the next few years, and airlines once again will bear the brunt of it. If the downswing happened tomorrow, now might be a good time to start training as you might meet the upswing when it happens if the trough is not too deep. On the other hand, you might start training now and find that the downswing happens the day you graduate! Or you might delay and find that the current boom lasts 3 years and you've missed it!

I wouldn't bother trying to second-guess all this stuff. Just get on with your training, don't get yourself too much in debt, and deal with the world as you find it once you graduate.

Scroggs

[potkettleblack]

Just expanding on one of the points made by Scroggs. There are fundamentals in the business models of airlines which make them inherently inflexible and slow to be able to respond to market forces. This is driven largely by their fixed cost bases. To take one example many carriers lease aircraft as opposed to owning them. When loads/yields drop as a result of factors outside of the control of an airline such as 9/11 the airlines cannot simply return an aircraft to the lessor and say sorry we can’t pay you anymore as this will trigger a host of penalty clauses in the lease agreement. So with a drop in turnover through lower bums on seats the only way to try to keep profitability in check is to find other costs to cut. Hence pilots, cabin crew and other staff are often the easiest targets and thus you get your cyclical pattern evolving.

[eoincarey]

Would just like to comment that as ever, Scroggs offers sound and well informed advice. Trying to guess where the market is now is a futile exercise. A far better option would be, as Scroggs quite rightly suggests, to do your training and give yourself the best possible chance for employment at the end of it. But only do this if you feel very motivated and prepared for the inevitable hardships.
My personal advice would be to check your own finances and their health, and also take some form of aptitude testing (like the GAPAN tests), have a deep think about whether this is the job you want, and go for it.

ETC