I have read recently about the looming problems that are coming when it comes to the number of pilots. There are already airlines in the USA which are having to give up flights or stop flights at certain times, due to a lack of pilots and there are a considerable number of pilots due to retire by 2022.  Apparently, flight schools have very few people showing interest and there are a number of problems.  Once you reached 1,500 hours of commercial flying you can become a commercial airline pilot earning approximately $139,000 a year, but that is the problem. Apparently, getting those 1,500 hours requires an investment firstly of close to $100,000 and becoming a pilot and the 1,500 hours of flying involve late nights, unpopular routes and unpopular tasks – such as flying corpses, etc.  

The airline industry is growing at a rate of about 5% a year in mature economies and in those like China, even faster and more and more people are flying more often than they did before.  Somewhere along the line, which is a little bit dangerous, they will probably have to reduce the number of hours’ flying experience that you have before you can become a pilot for a commercial airliner, then they have to try and encourage some of the pilots to keep working past retirement and somehow encourage more people into the industry.  Of course, the market will normally solve this problem – to a certain extent in a few years’ time pilots will hold all the aces and their salaries will go through the roof.  I guess there is a small catch to that and that is if people, in the not too distant future, are keen to save a bit of money and fly in a computerised plane with no pilot at all!  To a large extent I understand the job of a pilot now on these modern airlines to be punching a lot of buttons so maybe some people won’t mind if they are flown remotely a bit like drones.  I’d personally prefer to pay extra and have a human oversee it all though!

It is a problem that will affect everybody in the world, because obviously it will be fairly easy for countries with a powerful currency to lure away pilots from South African airlines like SAA and other smaller country airlines.  The reality is that around the world this is going to become a growing problem, and it does mean that the salaries of pilots in coming years are going to increase far ahead of most occupations on a percentage basis.  Sadly, I don’t think you can make the argument that the world has too few lawyers, but I do think that being a pilot is going to be a career option which more and more people will start talking about in 4 or 5 years’ time and perhaps later in countries that are slow to react to the looming shortage that will leave many planes around the world grounded.