There Are Too Many Pilots. So Why Can't Airlines Hire?

There is no shortage of pilots. There is a shortage of convincing ones.

I have been hearing about the coming pilot shortage since the day I started flying. A tsunami is on its way, apparently. It is due in about ten years, and it has been due in about ten years for more than two decades. Every few months a new report lands, usually from a manufacturer or a consultancy, warning that the industry will need an enormous number of new pilots. The press picks it up, flight schools put it on their brochures, and a new cohort of eighteen-year-olds signs a loan agreement on the strength of it.

Has the shortage ever happened?

Once, as far as I can tell. For about eighteen months in the United States after COVID, when the American carriers were rebuilding faster than the schools could supply. It was real, it was confined to one market, and it closed.

Everywhere else, and at every other time, the numbers run the other way.

In Europe, flight schools train roughly twice as many pilots as the airlines need. Around 6,000 come out of training in a typical year. There are around 3,000 jobs for them. In the United States the raw figures are larger, roughly 30,000 trained against 11,000 hired, and a good share of those 30,000 are international students who will go home and never compete for an American job. Allow for that and the ratio still lands close to Europe's. Twice as many pilots leave flight school as the industry can absorb.

None of this is secret. Anyone in a recruitment department knows it, and anyone who has spent a year applying for first officer positions has felt it. It does not make headlines, because "there are too many pilots" is not a story that sells aircraft or fills classrooms.

This is the part that confuses candidates, and it is worth slowing down on.

Airlines fail around three quarters of the candidates they assess. Seventy-five percent, give or take, depending on the carrier and the cycle. That is what I have seen from both sides of the table.

Now put those two facts together. Twice as many pilots as jobs, and a filter that rejects three in four of the ones who apply. Even with a large surplus of licensed pilots, an airline can find itself short of pilots it is willing to hire. When a fleet delivery arrives early, when a base opens, when a wave of retirements hits, the recruitment department has to fill seats quickly. It runs a series of assessment days and watches most of the room fail. That is the moment the airline tells the press it is struggling to find pilots. The statement is true, and it describes something very different from a shortage.

What they are short of is not people who hold licences. They are short of people who can walk into an assessment centre and convince a panel of line pilots that they are ready to sit in a flight deck with two hundred passengers behind them. Those two populations are very different sizes.

"Convincing" can sound like a personality trait. It is not one.

A convincing candidate flies the sim like someone who has operated an aircraft rather than someone who has passed a test in one. They can describe a decision they made in a way that surfaces the priorities a recruiter is scoring for, without being told what those priorities are. They have read enough about the airline to hold a conversation about its position and its culture rather than reciting the About Us page. They speak in a way the panel remembers, clearly and at a pace that lets the content land. And they have thought about the job as a job, with its fatigue and its rosters and its cost to the people at home.

Every item on that list is preparation rather than talent, and almost none of it is on a flight school syllabus. Which is why a market with a surplus of licences still produces assessment days where three in four people go home without an offer.

From the candidate's side, this is heartbreak. You have spent a six-figure sum and two or three years of your life. You have a licence that the headlines told you would be in desperate demand. You get to assessment and you fail, and you do not know why, because the parts you failed on were never parts you knew you were being tested on. Then you read another article about the shortage.

From the airline's side, it is the largest inefficiency in the recruitment function. Assessment days are expensive, and running them to reject seventy-five percent of the people who reach them is enormously wasteful, especially when, in my experience, most of those rejected would have made good pilot employees with a few months of the right preparation. The airline is filtering out unprepared pilots rather than bad ones, at great cost, and then telling the press there are no pilots.

Both problems have the same cause, and the same fix. Make pilots airline-ready before they reach the assessment centre.

The market is not going to come to you. It has not come to anyone in twenty years, outside one eighteen-month window on the other side of the Atlantic, and the structural picture is not changing. There will continue to be two of you for every seat.

That is not a reason to give up. The seventy-five percent who fail are not failing because they cannot fly. They are failing on things that can be learned, and most of them never tried to learn those things because nobody told them they existed. Do the second half of your preparation properly, the half that starts where your flight school stopped, and you are competing against a much smaller group than the headline numbers suggest.

There still is not a shortage of pilots. There is a shortage of convincing ones. Be one of those.

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