U.S. Regional Airlines Battle With Hiring, Retaining Pilots
The acute shortage of pilots, especially captains, continues to be a top challenge for U.S. commuter airlines, with the CEO of one of the largest regional operators saying that his airline is short by some 1,200 pilots.
Speaking at the Regional Airline Association’s (RAA) Leaders Conference in Washington Sept. 26, SkyWest Airlines President and CEO Chip Childs said his Utah-based airline has around 4,300 pilots today, far short of where it stood in 2019, while demand for air service in smaller cities is growing, exacerbating the pilot gap that almost all U.S. regional carriers are grappling with.
Childs, who also chairs the RAA board of directors, pointed out that many Americans moved from large to small cities during the pandemic, resulting in new, high demand for regional air service.
SkyWest has a fleet of more than 130 Embraer E175s and some 250 Bombardier CRJs operating for Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and United Airlines. Childs said that in 2019, the carrier had established a strong pilot pipeline through some 200 schools. But the pandemic and retirements have “snapped back” the carrier into pilot shortage mode.
SkyWest is far from alone. The U.S. major airlines, to fill their own gaps when post-pandemic demand for flights surged, have recruited heavily from the regionals.
“We’ve become extraordinarily short of captains,” Childs said. “We are trying to do the things it takes to create captains and keep captains.”
In a CEO panel session, Republic Airways President and CEO Bryan Bedford said the labor shortage affecting regionals went beyond pilots. Republic is the largest carrier operating in the U.S. northeast/New York metro area, where airspace has been severely constrained by a shortage of air traffic controllers. “From a customer perspective, that is felt day by day by day,” Bedford said.
Rick Leach, president and CEO at Go Jet Airlines, a Bombardier CRJ550 operator for United, said the labor issue was about pilots, but also about technicians and others who support the industry. “There’s a lot of demand and opportunity,” he said, but it’s about how to get people trained and operational as soon and as safely as possible. “It’s tough to find those candidates, especially at the captain level,” he said.
Dion Flannery, president and CEO at PSA Airlines, the wholly owned regional arm of American Airlines, concurred it was a tough problem. “Our focus is trying to come to peace with running a business model that says give us your last available flight hour every moment and get it right, six months ahead of time,” he said.
“I don’t think it’s an issue of training or training capacity,” Bedford said. “What has changed over the last 18 months is that the pilot qualifications from the larger carriers have changed. It used to be a minimum of a bachelor’s degree and minimum of 2,000 hr. of command experience before they would be considered by a major, and those qualifications have now been removed, almost in their entirety. And so essentially, once we onboard someone and train them and demonstrate they have the competence to fly as a first officer, they are now viable at the major airlines, so we are not able to retain that experience.”
By Karen Walker
Karen Walker is Air Transport World Editor-in-Chief and Aviation Week Network Group Air Transport Editor-in-Chief. She joined ATW in 2011 and oversees the editorial content and direction of ATW, Routes and Aviation Week Group air transport content.
- Published in News Items
The Airline Industry Has Put a Dent in the Pilot Shortage
The pilot shortage has alleviated over the past year but still remains a substantial impediment for U.S. air service, especially in small markets.
According to an analysis by consulting firm Oliver Wyman, pilot availability for North American airlines is approximately 14,300 short of demand, an improvement over last year’s shortage of approximately 16,900.
However, the shortage would be more severe — an additional 6,000 pilots — if regional carriers were flying the same number of planes as they did before the pandemic, explained Oliver Wyman partner Geoff Murray at the Regional Airline Association’s (RAA) annual meeting on Tuesday.
U.S. regional aircraft flying, which typically connects small and midsize markets with airline hubs, has declined 36% from 2019, Murray said.
While the largest U.S. airlines say they have largely caught up on pilot hiring for mainline flights, a pronounced impact continues in the regional sector, Murray said, since the larger airlines do most of their hiring from the regional ranks.
According to the Wyman analysis, 75% of mainline pilots are hired out of the regional sector, with the remainder coming from business aviation and the military. The company estimates that 44% of the regional pilot workforce of 18,100 will get hired at a mainline U.S. carrier this year, including a whopping 59% of regional airline captains.
Murray said the pilot deficit improved in the past year due both to reduced demand and increased supply. Demand for pilots has been driven down by parked regional aircraft, planes being flown fewer hours per day than is optimal, and supply chain-related production delays.
Meanwhile, pilot supply has increased due to a bump in the number of pilots achieving certification to fly for commercial airlines. This year, Oliver Wyman expects 6,900 new North American airline pilots, countering 4,200 pilot retirements.
FAA data also show that pilot hiring is on the rise. Through August of this year, the agency had issued 7,526 of the Air Transport Pilot (ATP) certificates, which are the certificates required to fly for a commercial airline. That’s up 8% compared to the same period a year ago, according to an analysis from the Air Line Pilots Association.
Still, the Wyman study projects that the pilot shortage will persist for the foreseeable future and will still be approximately 13,000 a decade from now, driven in part by a 30% increase in demand for pilots over that period.
The RAA says that its members were flying 300 fewer aircraft this July than they did in July 2019. Those reductions have been driven by the pilot shortage and by airline strategies to focus more on mainline flying, which offers larger margins.
Forty U.S. airports have lost at least half their flights since 2019, according to the RAA.
Robert Silk
- Published in News Items, Uncategorized
SkyWest’s CEO Reveals the Regional Carrier is ‘1,200 Pilots Short’
Regional airlines continue to be most acutely affected by the USA’s ongoing pilot shortage as SkyWest Airlines remains some 1,200 pilots below its pre-pandemic staffing levels.
Chief executive Chip Childs said during the Regional Airline Association’s Leaders Conference in Washington DC that SkyWest currently employs 4,300 pilots, compared with 5,500 pilots in 2019.
“We still have a major pilot shortage that is having a huge impact on us as a company, the entire industry and small communities,” he told conference attendees on 26 September. “We are literally 1,200 pilots short.”
“There is a lot of narrative that there’s not a shortage,” Childs says, seemingly referring to pilot unions downplaying the lack of qualified flight crews. “But it’s absolutely true… The gap is real, the gap is a challenge and I think we’re to the point now where it’s going to take a very long time to get back to meeting the demand in the regional space.”
Childs estimates that SkyWest needs 1,000 more pilots than it had prior to the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in order to meet the current demand for regional airline travel. He notes that demand is being boosted by the “de-urbanisation of the United States, where people are moving out of big cities into smaller, mid-sized cities” and the rise of remote- and hybrid-working arrangements.
While the pilot shortage remains a major industry challenge, Childs cautions that aircraft maintenance technicians are also in short supply.
“We are going to need a lot of heavy maintenance to bring those aircraft back online, when and if we solve the pilot shortage,” he says.
SkyWest is the largest regional carrier in the USA, with a fleet of more than 450 regional aircraft currently in service, according to Cirium fleets data. The carrier has about 100 aircraft in storage – all Bombardier CRJ-series regional jets.
By Howard Hardee
- Published in News Items