Where have all the pilots gone? How a looming shortage may curtail e-commerce

What needs to be done

At this point, there isn’t a silver bullet, since many of the problems won’t be felt for a few years. And with Washington still unresponsive, U.S. carriers are thinking about other ways to lure pilots into the business.

On a practical level, one improvement would be to use regional cargo carriers and training feeders for the larger airlines. That would involve lowering requirements for smaller cargo aircraft, and letting new pilots gain experience on cargo flights. It’s also a compromise that seems to address Sen. Schumer’s concerns about adequate training to protect lives. Komberec stressed the importance of this sort of cooperation between regional and national carriers, and training pilots for major carriers in regional cargo planes is a great start.

RACCA also points out that the FAA has the authority to “expedite and grant current petitions and exemptions that do not violate the public law, but will greatly increase the available pilot pool.”

Looking further ahead, there has been informal discussion of a national program that promotes entry into the business, although Komberec notes that, “it is only talk at this point.” What such a program would look like is therefore uncertain, but it’s goal would be to make pilot training affordable and attractive, either via public funding, or some public-private partnership model, in which pilots would pursue training at a lower cost, with the expectation that they would take certain lower-tier jobs. Such a model is already well established in Europe. Many foreign students in U.S. flight schools are enrolled in these programs, and are sponsored by their national carriers. South Korean students, for example, gain experience co-piloting Ameriflight regional cargo aircraft, while their sponsors pay Ameriflight. Everybody wins.

Until such compromise solutions become more available, people learning the trade like Dover did, by instinct in bug smashers, may become a dying breed.

Komberec and other regional bosses understand that the day is approaching when they will simply have to say, no. “At some point, overnight services to smaller cities will be relegated to two-day trucking, and a lot of critical overnight service is going to be taken away from smaller communities. There will be some form of degradation of the services that we enjoy today.”

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