Now air speed is alive. And we rotate at 55, 55
rotate, pull up. Yes, look how beautiful this
bird flies and we'll climb with 80 knots. This 23-year-old is part of
Alaska Airlines effort to fix the pilot shortage
crisis. North American airlines
have a deficit of 8,000 pilots or about 11% of the
total workforce. Do you see the right one?
Yes. 324. All right. Here we go. It's a great feeling to
know that I could take control of an airplane,
tiny as me, 5'3" short little girl, having a
little booster seat. Alaska's Ascend Pilot
Academy, launched in 2022, offers would be aviators,
financial incentives and employment opportunities at
Alaska Airlines and regional partner Horizon
Air. Programs like this are
perhaps the most significant step carriers are taking to
address the exodus of pilots. The shortfall could
reach up to 30,000 in North America by 2025. There's just not enough
pilots, and it's not a quick fix on pilots. And the industry at the
start of the year was going to try to hire 13,000
pilots. The last decade there's
been a new supply of 5 to 7,000 pilots. The math just
doesn't work. It's great to see that
there's such a need for pilots, but there's a level
of how did this happen that you're almost standing on a
street corner, step right up, come be a pilot. I mean it. Here's some
money. That's a sign that we have
failed as an institution. And it's not just the lack
of pilots that is impacting aviation, mechanics,
baggage handlers and air traffic controllers are
also in short supply. So what led to the shortage
of pilots in the US and what are carriers like United,
Delta and Alaska doing to fix the problem? Caitlyn Jimenez graduated
from Cal State, L.A., with a degree in child
development. That's when I was, like,
putting my foot down after graduation I was like, I
can't go into teaching. I want to do something
different, which is fly. I want to fly. I want to fly. I'm eager to
fly. Beyond telling her parents,
her second biggest obstacle was figuring out how to pay
for flight school. To become an airline pilot
costs range from $80,000 to over $100,000, made more
difficult by years of training. Where am I going to live? How am I going to afford
it? How am I going to pay off
the loans? The costs are definitely a
barrier to becoming a pilot. Jimenez enrolled in Alaska's
Ascend Pilot Academy in Hillsboro, Oregon. The program offers eligible
students a stipend of up to $25,000, as well as low
interest loans. Jimenez, along with most of
her class, had no prior piloting experience. And full power right rudder. Beautiful. Cadets start
their day in ground school, followed by training on a
flight simulator. 31. One of the things that
we do with flight training is we progressively
introduce more and more complex maneuvers. So what
we're going to practice is an engine failure. What you're going to do is
bring the throttle back to idle after you rotate and
then try to land the aircraft safely. Pitch. Pitch, pitch. Lower the
nose. Lower the nose. I get your flaps, doing
great. So right now it looks pretty
good. We have some thunderstorm segments at
the coast and we have some in Seattle. Preflight planning is
followed by an inspection of the aircraft. Exactly. And on board training with
an instructor. Alaska says it can take a
year to 18 months to train a cadet to become a
commercial pilot. Then also the same. We just
check if the person before us did not have a tail
strike. Plus 1,500 hours or roughly
two years to get a FAA pilot license. Oregon's
challenging weather conditions are another
obstacle. So it's very quick. You're going to learn
something today and then you're going to do it the
next day. The Academy also hopes to
diversify who sits in the pilot's seat? Only about 6%
of us airline pilots are people of color, and less
than 6% are women. I do want to represent me
being a Mexican and me being a female and me being small
and tiny that, you know, if I could do it, people could
do it. Now, at 900, we can turn
one Westbound. (Radio Traffic) And you can just continue
climbing. U.S. carriers are scrambling
for solutions to add and retain crew members. American Airlines owned
regional carriers Piedmont and Envoy hiked pilot pay
by 50% through the end of August 2024. Delta, along with several
carriers, have dropped the four year degree from pilot
hiring requirements. And SkyWest and Frontier
Airlines have recruited pilots from as far away as
Australia. But what led to the
shortage of pilots in the first place? In a bid to
slash costs during the COVID pandemic, airlines grounded
planes and offered early retirement packages to
thousands of senior pilots. Pilots took the early
retirement for a variety of reasons. There's 1,000
pilots and may be near 1,000 reasons why. But in
general, a pilot may have reached a point in their
career where they said, you know what, I'm 62 and I'm
feeling it. A halt to training during
the pandemic also impacted the pipeline. Training never stops in the
airline business. The number one logjam right
now at American Airlines is the training pipeline. It has collapsed. A massive amount of
training that they didn't do during the pandemic is
still an overhang on that system. Carriers have also seen
fewer pilots coming from the military, which has faced
recruitment issues of its own. The Department of
Defense had a shortfall of 3,000 pilots, according to
a 2019 report to Congress. The Air Force and its
Reserves finished fiscal year 2018, down 2,000
pilots, or roughly 10% of its staffing. The
transition to drone pilots is also impacting
commercial carriers. The military of today is not
just about traditional airplanes and helicopters. They're flying drones and
they've got all sorts of other new types of
aircraft. Frankly, a lot of the folks
from the Air Force Academy now you see more drone
pilots than you do commercial pilots. That
pipeline has dried up over 40%. So we've got to make
up for that from somewhere else. And perhaps the hardest hit
segment of the industry is regional carriers like Mesa
Airlines, who have seen their ranks poached by
higher paying national rivals. As a result of the
pilot shortage we have lost scheduled airline service
to more than 50 smaller US cities. So a few airlines have
already started to cancel flights because they say
that they do have a lack of pilots. That's a really big
deal, especially in small cities, because those are
served by regional airlines and that's where the pilot
shortage is the most acute. There are about 164,000
pilots in the U.S. with an airline transport
certificate. A senior captain at the
helm of a wide body plane flying for a national
carrier can make around $400,000 a year. But before reaching that
milestone, pilots often spend years flying for
regional carriers. A captain at a regional
airline starts off making about $100,000 a year. You may be operating
anywhere from 4 to 6 flight segments a day, depending
on how long they are. You may get as little as 10
hours or so of rest a night, and you may be away from
home for 3 to 5 days at a time. It can be very
physically grueling. It can be emotionally
taxing. A drop in new pilots
entering the field means almost half of pilots are
approaching the mandatory retirement age of 65. One third of pilots in the
U.S. Are in their fifties.
Another 13% are between 60 and 64. Some are calling
for legislation to increase the retirement age to 67,
but not everyone agrees. I don't think the retirement
age will get lifted. I also don't think it's the
solution at United our age, 64 pilots, 36% of them are
unavailable to fly on a given day for sick, long
term or short term medical. The medical requirements
are really, really stringent for being a pilot. Another possible change
would be to reduce the flight time required for a
pilot to be certified. Following the crash of
Colgan Air Flight 3407 in Buffalo, New York, in 2009
the FAA set new rules for pilots. U.S. regulations require pilots
to have 1,500 hours of flight time before being
allowed to work at a commercial airline. Those hours can be achieved
doing anything from flight instruction to banner
towing operations. There are exceptions for
some students and military. But critics argue the 1,500
hour rule is costly and puts too high a burden on new
pilots. The accessibility to flight
experience, the hours and the actual experience is
devastating these young aviators. The debate will
be whose neck is on the line should an accident occur in
the future, where a pilot with less than 1,500 hours
of experience is at the controls of an airliner,
that crashes. In the meantime, carriers
are taking matters into their own hands and moving
more of their pilot trading duties in-house. Like Alaska, United opened
its Aviate Academy in 2022, offering incoming students
financial incentives along with low interest loans. The carrier said it plans
to train 5,000 new pilots at its facility by 2030 and
hire 10,000 pilots that same year. It's not just United, it's
JetBlue, Delta, American, Southwest. They're all
looking to now bring some of these things in-house,
whereas before they were more used to looking to
outside or come when you have experience. Well,
right now they need it now. And those programs are
welcome news for travelers facing long lines at the
airport and flight delays brought about by the acute
pilot shortage, which is likely to get worse. North America will need
more than 128,000 new pilots over the next two decades. And what the airlines and
regional airlines, major airlines are all trying to
do, same thing goes for the cargo carriers because they
need new pilots as well, is trying to recruit as as
young as possible or as early in the careers of a
pilot as possible. It's unbelievable that we
were able to go up in the sky and do things not a lot
of people can do. It's a beautiful feeling.
