Pilot Shortage
 

Apparently there is supposed to be a "Worldwide Pilot Shortage".........:D

Where exactly is this shortage:confused:

Happy Landings!!!!!!

Pete!!!!!!!!

There is a shortage - of sorts. A shortage of pilots with 1000s of hrs on type - which a lot of employers seem to want. As they aren't finding these pilots, one can only expect that their minimun requirements will have to decrease if they are going to fill those seats.

India and China are going to need large numbers of pilots soon, so it may have not filtered through to the lower levels of experience yet. One good thing is that the number of companies offering jobs where you have to pay for your own rating are reducing. If pilots stopped taking these jobs they will dissapear altogether!

Well guys, Just heard that EZY are asking their existing pilot work force if they can 'recommend a friend' to join their ranks. Just one example of the improving job market. Things are definitely looking a great deal brighter than they were just 12 months ago. Best of luck.:ok:

I dont think there will ever be a shortage!

Aussie

There is no shortage of pilots; but there is a shortage of current [within 1-year] and qualified [5000 hrs total heavy jet, 500 hrs PIC on type] pilots. :ooh:

I think China-Airlines is training 500 pilots over next 5 years in Canada. Becoming a pilot is quite easy now, with schools offering the full rating packages in 9 months.

At what cost???????


Aussie

I do not have a "friend " at Easy, but they did not accept my application,although, I have 2600 TT, 2000 JAR 25 T, 1600 Jet wide-body T.:confused: :ugh:

I got a reject, PFO EM recently. I phoned up to ask why, as I met all the criteria they asked for. Zoe told me to go back into the application form and review VERY carefully what I had written as if you do not for example, insert the dates correctly, say you wrote 1.1.70 instead of 01/01/1970, it throws the sysem out and you automatically get a "rejected" EM.
Also review the reason why you want to join Easy.

I reapplied and did not get a rejected EM this this around.
Try again and see how it goes.:ok:

BR.

When did you guys get rejected?? Think you should apply again....just a tip...
Good luck!
/CP

easy recommending
 

Anyone to recommend me then? ;)

Of course you can be 'unrecommended' too. A few years ago I attended an RAF reunion. A few of us started talking about easyJet's recruitment practices. Putting two and two together we concluded that a former colleague:} who was not present but flew for easyJet had been spiking our applications. Apparently he was neutralising potential political threats.

Difficult to prove of course but someone who was thoroughly sly and duplicitous twenty years ago probably hadn't changed his spots.

Yarpy

It's not just the ex-RAF types who do that. An ex-RN colleague tried it with an application of mine which backfired in a major way on him and his crony. Strange how it seems to be the ex service people who do it most often.

:ok:

Where's the shortage? Definitely not here in the US.

Specific Shortages.!
 

Dan and GlueBal, you are both dead right.

There has always been misconceptions about pilot shortages.

Southeast Asia for instance, is flooded with Airlines which have increased their fleets dramatically in the last few years and are looking for Experienced, Type Rated and Current pilots to crew their planes.

Hopefully that short term shortage will filter down to the lower end, low time pilots in the near future.

Good luck to all..:ok:

The shortage is here in Finland more exactly Finnair, Finncomm, Air Finland and so on. That's where it's at.

/LnS

Every few months somebody comes up with pilot shortage. In a sense I guess it is a bit of wishfull thinking, more then anything else. I strongly believe that there will never ever, ever, be a lack of pilots, because there are just to many walking around without a job. Every handling agent I talk to seems to have a cpl these days. Everyone who brings me the loadsheet seems to pop the question: how do I get in your company. We are talking about 4000 unemployed fully licensed pilots in my country alone. Offcourse they are lowtimers, and that doesn't seem to count.

If you would put experience in 3 groups:
- lowtime <200 hours, no airline experience
- medium commuter experience, or jet job, 1000\2000 hours fo
- hightime pic 5000 hours jet experience

Now the hightime guys are always in demand. They were even in demand right after sept11. The lowtime are never in demand and never will. No pilot shortage there. In the words of my manager: I kick a rock and there are 10 lowtimers crawling from underneath it!

The real winners are the medium experience guys. I have seen myself in the last year go from not interesting c.v., to invitations from mayor airlines which I would never have dreamed off. But people are still paying for typeratings, even those with experience. And salaries are still generally crap, not speaking of the working hours. So I wonder how desperate the companies really are. If pilots are in such short supply, then they should lurk us with nice jobs, good salaries and fine working conditions. I have not seen that as yet......

Pontious, you have just reminded me. The bloke in question was ex RN.:(

Actually, he did me a favour by all accounts.

Easy?
 

Becoming a pilot is never easy - remaining a pilot is even harder - being a good pilot takes years of training, experience and listening to those who have been there, done it, got the T-Shirt.:ok:

The shortage of pilots exists but is in specific areas, as the man said. Experienced and type rated - well I have never had so many possibilities. My current company has all the CVs it can deal with but the shortage is for captains and especially type rated ones. We have even started to take very experience, type rated SFOs as direct entry captains. Notwithstanding the current security nonsense, it is a great time to be in the industry.
PS My quality of life has taken a great leap forward since leaving EZY. Their 'recommend a friend' is not new but even when I was there, I asked a lot of questions of people who expressed a desire to join. The life there suits some people but definitely not all.

A major airline in the US, which is not even the largest, has about 700 pilots on furlough.

The only shortage which has existed for decades has consisted mostly of what type of bias the crew hiring staff have, whether for mostly pilots with primarily military experience, or for a mix of military and civilian backgrounds.

The mix of pilots who flew three or more types of transport-category planes and are below a certain age can describe an artificial category of a so-called shortage, especially if they must have a 4-year college degree.

One airline, back in the good old days, had "no show" pilots missing on the first day of new-hire Initial Training groundschool with little or no notice, because of its limited and reportedly dreary selection of cities with crewbases :D .

There is a shortage at Flybe!

They are desperate for Captains, so if anyone with command hrs wants the left seat of a Q400?

Or?

Yep, maybe give it a wide berth!

----------------
endofeng:ok:

Pilots Shortage???
 

:bored:
I wrote some 50 Applications this Year,
have around 7500hrs on Turboprops, half of them in Comand, got three offers, haven`t accepted these.
-->
Low Pay or
every Weekend Traveling some hundres of km to the Homebase by Rail or
no Pensionsceme and no Health Insurance, or
bying a TR for around 30.000Euro and flying fot 2.200 Net as Co or
bying a TR for around 55.000 Euro/Job Broker in the UK/no Job guaranteed
or or or

There are Jobs. . .

Job`s
 

P.S.
...send also Applications to Kingfisher(3x) and Jetairways (3x),
no Response... :ugh:

there is a shortage, but airlines don't want pay or do not want even train pilots.

they are short of experienced captains, but during all these years, they didn't want to offer uprade trainings.

it is hard enough to pay for his training, then pay for a type rating, pay for hours, and then pay to find a job...I am not surprised by the post of Fliegendenflieger, this is scandalous and it scares me.

some airlines offer block of hours to their pilots (pay to work), afer a few months they leave the company resulting a market filled with low hours jet pilots having several type raitings but no real experience to become a good captain.

who to blame?airlines or pilots who accept anyhing just to fly some hours.

GAMA
 

Hey,you want to try GAMA ! You are bonded for over twice what it costs them to have you trained and then bond you EACH year for about 7k (pounds) that you are with the company .This is to cover ''recurrent '' training costs..............................!

What a bloody cheek.

C.:(

A Genuine Pilot Shortage
 

BMI has an ad running in the current FI for NON TYPE RATED/DIRECT ENTRY CAPTS....Turbo-Prop experience acceptable... The first such ad I've seen since the beggining of the recession in '93... seems that there really is a pilot shortage now.

Haven't seen the add but are the jobs at bmi mainline, bmi baby or bmi regional. There is no shortage of suitably qualified first officers at mainline. This is despite the fact that the company have lost a large number of seriously senior and experienced training Captains to Easyjet recently. Mind you with the current climate at mainline the management love it when people leave because it repressents a financial saving!:mad:

easyJet posted recently good profits, but those would have been massively increased if they had adequate numbers of crew to fly their planes this year. No mention of this to investors I noticed. With thousands of cancelled flights and a large number of aircraft leased in easyJet are one of a number of airlines struggling to keep pace with expansion (taking previous internal politics there aside).

Mungo,

With reference to BMI recruiting ....

I think you will find that its bmiBaby - not the Airbus operation.
Things are so stagnant at BMI, that captains fly with other captains almost as often as first officers. There are a very large number of command assessed senior first officers with 3 strips ...

Is is actually BMI Regional.

Situation in Belgium & FR
 

There are indeed big changes ahead, at least here in Belgium.

From what I know about 80-90 ab initio candidates with valid licences were available last summer of which 45 will go to Brussels Airlines in the coming 6 months!, 15 to the ex Virgin, some at DHL/EAT, VLM is also short of pilots and prefers now to hire over contract pilots and Thomas Cook/TUI will also be taking in some 20 pilots or more, TUI seems to be looking for candidates without even MCC now as they found close to 0 candidates for the SSTR :D :D
As far as I know not too many new people in training for the moment with the high cost of training - +100k€ and the uncertainty of what will come in 2 years...
TNT Liege is another story - they stopped recruitment after the 737 incident 6 months or so ago, published on Flight Int for a few weeks looking for experienced capt/FO, apparently without success as they are starting to call all candidates from this week of whom most are already committed.

I experienced the FR recruitment too and although there are still enough candidates to start the SSTR - the myth of the database with 1000's of pilots is definitly out of the door as many candidates for the interview were there after a call only a few days before sim eval day. MOL is definitly wrong in his NY investor presentation stating the supply is and will remain unlimited - I guess many airines will have to start cadet programs in the very near future or the shortage will become a threat to their forecasted growth.

Good for the pilots and the general conditions - finally.:ok:

Ryanair will train 120 cadets in CAE AMS and 120 in SAS Stockholm over the next 12 months.They are also looking at the far east for MPL courses!

ps Not including DE pilots!!

The significance of the ad to my mind was the fact that they were willing to take non type-rated pilots from the turbo-prop pool and type-rate them as direct entry capts. I know that many companes train up wanabees and pay them peanuts to move the c of g fwd an inch or so but this is the first indication that I've seen that experienced, non type-rated guys are getting a chance to move into the main-line again...
We've heard the term pilot shortage being bandied around for the last couple of years but what the companies really mean is a lack of pilots who can move into their cockpits without costing them a type rating.. There are probably a few thousand very experienced pilots out there who's day is shortly arriving... let's hope. ( of course...I don't know what sort of bonding or repayment scheme may be attached to the offer )

TNT Liege is another story - they stopped recruitment after the 737 incident 6 months or so ago

What was this incident?

Not even close I am afraid, you really should pay attention.... ;)

bmi Regional advertised at least two times before this advert, looking for exactly the same thing, so it is not new.

This advert appeared at the exact same time the BA Connect sale was made public. I very much doubt bmi will now need to look at anyone without a Emb145 rating.... :bored:

Something to do with leaving an undercarriage leg behind at a Midlands airport if I remember right....

And the rest of it at another:ooh:

shortage ?
 

I don't believe there is a shortage now or for quite a while -there are just too many keep folk paying for their tickets (including type ratings) for that to happen, unless the economy dips & reduces cash flows but that would affect demand too so idemand/shortage is directly affected either way

Sorry to be a party pooper but those days of shortages are long gone I fear especially when the pollution taxes kick in & kill the Lo-Co op's long term.

6 years ago I applied to the biggest airline in Hong Kong.
I received a very curt form letter saying

"We have your CV on file.
Update it every 6 months quoting this reference number.
We might get back to you, we might not."

I decided that an organisation that was so impersonal was not for me, so never wrote to them again. Since then my life has moved on and I'm happy where I am doing what I'm doing.

Last week I received a letter from the Hong Kong airline inviting me to reapply for a position senior to what I originally applied for. I repeat I have had no communication with them in 6 years.

And this is one of those airlines that lots of pilots aspire to join.

I conclude from this that they must be short of suitable pilot applicants and are hunting far and wide to find some.
In other words;

There is a very serious shortage of suitably qualified, experienced pilots.

1000's of unemployed pilots in France
 

Heard from someone, don't know how true it is, that there are 1000's of unemployed pilots in France and a substantial proportion of these have loads of time on the large stuff. Now pray, if this is true why do the likes of FR and EasyJet have aircraft on the ground short of crews. Is is something to do with French licenses not being JAR acceptable? Or is this just another unfounded rumour?