The Pilot Shortage Will Be Worse Than Anyone Believes

The infectious excitement surrounding the U.S. Sport Aviation Expo in Sebring Florida last month made it pretty clear that the Light Sport Aircraft (LSA) movement offers a far different air show experience than Air Venture, or Sun & Fun or most other local events. In a nice way, I was impressed with the ease of browsing at the 20 or 30 new aircraft on display.

But the exhilaration of seeing a full range of LSA airplanes, ones an average pilot can actually afford to own and fly, was overshadowed by another revelation I took away from Sebring. More sobering was the realization that everywhere, I ran into pilots and enthusiasts who were not only past 50 like me, but many easily past 60, 70 and beyond.

While the graying of the pilot world will hardly come as a profound shock to anyone, AOPA’s Kathleen Vascouselos said on a recent AvWeb podcast that the total pilot population drop is worse than anyone has even imagined, from 850,000 in the early 1990s to 597,000 today.

Couple those numbers with preponderance of old men and women I see around airports and shows and lots of aircraft-marketing people are probably having nightmares … lots and lots of nightmares, because in 10 to 15 years, a huge chunk of the nation’s pilot population is going to simply drop off the face of the Earth, never to return.

And we’ve trained few replacements. Plenty has been written about the ever-deepening pit both the airlines and business aviation will soon find themselves as the demand for pilots rapidly increases in the face of a diminishing supply. FLTops.com said last week that regional are already scrambling for pilots.

What should also be ruining the dreams of the marketing folks at Piper, Cessna, Cirrus and the LSA builders however, is that along with the retirement of a lot of professional pilots comes the elimination of the vast majority of recreational pilots – the people who used to fly for fun — and their need for new airplanes.

Certainly the Be-A-Pilot folks and AOPA have spent millions trying to entice more people to learn to fly, as have a few flight schools. Quite a few people have started the learning process, in fact. The problem is that few continue on to receive their license unless they see a serious business need to own and fly an airplane.

Funding has basically dwindled at Be-A-Pilot until it is now a mere shadow of its former self. And that diminishing supply of people who fly for fun spells big trouble for the future of GA in this country since we’ll not simply be retiring professional pilots soon, but recreational pilots as well. And honestly, the money is being cut off because the results have been questionable.

Most airport managers and Fixed Base Operators will tell you their marketing efforts are focused on turbine-powered airplanes because that’s where the profits are. But what they can’t tell you is where the pilots to fly those airplanes – any airplanes 10-15 years down the road – will come from if general aviation experiences the massive slowdown in operations the numbers seem to indicate. The FAA administrator is so focused on making user fees a reality, money she says they need to fund the next generation ATC system, that they have no ideas on how to encourage people to fly.

Let’s see, neither FBOs, airports or FAA seem to know how they’ll encourage people to learn to fly because they are to busy serving their customers today to realize that despite the significant steps up in aviation since 9/11, the industry is headed for a big whack in the side of the head soon. AOPA is trying, but they can’t do it alone.

Most airports and FBOs don’t see career education as their job. The FAA does, but only in a very broad sense. Could this all have anything to do with FAA dropping the promotion of aviation from their mission statement a decade ago? It just might. But now is not the time to point fingers of blame. We already do way too much of that in this country. Blame won’t solve the problem. Just as the Chinese economy has begun to compete with the U.S. for oil supplies, so too will they and India begin to compete with the U.S. for pilots.

So right now, we don’t know how we’re going to supply professional pilots over the next decade, much less the recreational ones to buy the airplanes our companies want to build. And no one seems to have figured out why flight training, the pilot base for all commercial and private pilot starts, is not simply faltering, but going comatose, in addition to the overall awful marketing efforts most flight schools produce that is. It is high time for a massive sit down between the parties – FAA, FBOs, flight schools, aircraft manufacturers, NBAA and airline representatives – to not just talk about pilot shortages, but to craft some new initiatives that will make a dent in the drain at the bottom of the bucket before it becomes and even bigger leak.

It’s time we call this what this looming pilot shortage what it truly is becoming … not a crisis, but a catastrophe. Maybe Be-A-Pilot was not as successful as some had hoped, but it was a start. If we don’t start developing Be-A-Pilot 2.0 and incorporate the good marketing efforts that worked with some new ideas to encourage people to fly for fun and for money, there isn’t going to be an aviation industry a decade or two down the road.

We can’t simply sit back, say we tried and hope someone else will fix the problem. Trust me, just like the user fee crisis, the pilot shortage is a problem from ALL of us. You are the “someone else” to help the industry survive … and if you still don’t think this is about survival of the industry, just archive this blog and stop back in ten years, maybe sooner to see how the future has unfolded.