Is the commercial airline pilot shortage over? Maybe, some airlines have frozen pilot hiring and others have laid some off or offered paid them not to fly.
If you are considering booking travel or signing up for a new credit card please click here. Both support LiveAndLetsFly.com.
If you haven’t followed us on Facebook or Instagram, add us today.
Demand For Pilots Cooling?
There was a mass panic at the height of revenge travel following the pandemic that the pilot supply issue many had been advising for years had come to fruition all at once. Unprecedented demand for qualified pilots led to the biggest compensation contracts in the history of the airline industry.
However, in recent weeks, several carriers have quietly stopped hiring new pilots at its prior breakneck pace. Others reigned in their approach months ago. Does this mean that demand for pilots is finally cooling?
Frontier Airlines
Frontier has altered its plans to continue to grow without a merger with Spirit which died in the hands of investors due to a better off from JetBlue about 18 months ago. Growing organically is harder, certainly, but that is the carrier’s current path. It’s continued to look for new pilot talent and has its own pilot training program like many carriers to reduce the debt load and get more aspiring pilots into the cockpit. However, that effort has slowed though not completely stopped:
“[During the last week of January 2024], according to a report by Aero Crew News, Frontier Airlines slowed down its hiring of pilots. This comes after initial reports from last week that the airline was pausing its hiring of pilots altogether. However, further clarifying comments by the Denver, Colorado-based airline have clarified that the carrier is slowing down its hiring pipeline.
The ultra-low-cost carrier has begun slowing down its pilot hiring. This was due to an increased number of pilots in its recent classes that have exceeded its initially predicted capacity.” – Simpleflying
JetBlue Airways
Gary Leff at ViewFromTheWing.com found that JetBlue had offered to pay 350 pilots half of their maximum hours (or 2/3rds of average compensation) for the month of April to not fly at all. He points out that following the retirement of CEO Robin Hayes, and the entry of investor Carl Icahn, the carrier is looking to reduce unprofitable routes, and shore up more revenue.
The carrier remains actively appealing a judicial decision that block its acquisition of Spirit.
Ravn
Ravn, an Alaska regional airline just announced it would be letting 1/3rd of its staff go. Pilots were included in the layoffs which were across the board and affected some 130 staff members.
“[Ravn CEO] McKinney sent an email to employees Friday discussing the changes as a “restructure” and saying the airline is not “throwing in the towel.”
The email cited a lack of profits, coupled with costly surprises such as inflation, the labor shortage and competition. Inefficient legacy operations were also a factor, the email said.” – Anchorage Daily News
Southwest Airlines
The largest domestic carrier in the US has quietly stopped adding pilots to the rolls. The carrier has “suspended” adding more pilots for the time being. There’s speculation that this could be in part due to the 737 delivery issues which will slow growth across a variety of carriers, but coupled with the others on this list, it seems like equipment alone may not capture the entire picture.
“Amid a long saga of hiring challenges and contract negotiations, American low-cost carrier Southwest Airlines announced today that it has suspended pilot hiring for most of 2024. Southwest will go without a new pilot hire class for the first time in decades, a decision driven by several complex factors.” – Simpleflying
FedEx
FederalExpress might have been the canary in the coal mine on this issue months ago, suggesting its pilots fill positions at American Airlines back in November of 2023. At that point, softening cargo demand was the issue which was surprising heading into the busiest time of year for freight operations.
United Airlines
Just in the knick of time, United Airlines finished an expansion of its massive pilot training facility in Denver.
“United Airlines officially opened a new 150,000-square-foot building at its Flight Training Center in Denver on Thursday, marking a milestone in its quest to hire 10,000 new pilots by 2030.” – Denver Post
The facility is home to 46 simulators across 700,000 sq ft an is said to now operate 24 hours a day. United has not stopped hiring pilots though that may not be reflective of the current needs as much as United’s goal to grow regardless of demand:
“It’s fundamental to our ability to really implement United Next (plan), which is growing United Airlines at about twice the rate that any other airline in the world has grown in history and doing that for years in a row,” Kirby told The Denver Post before the ceremony.
United hired approximately 2,300 pilots in 2023 and has added more than 300 so far this year. Kirby said the airline didn’t share the general consensus that air travel wouldn’t fully recover from the pandemic and began planning in 2020 to “leapfrog” others in the industry by expanding the workforce and its fleet.” – Denver Post
Pilot Contracts and the Pilot Shortage
Live And Let’s Fly has always been supportive of pilots and airline labor generally. We have outlined that the United States mandatory retirement age of 65 is arbitrary and poorly thought out as is the 1,500 flight hour minimum for commercial pilots which in part caused the pilot shortage in the first place. Coupled with that 2009 congressional decision, early retirements over the course of years, and the baby boomer retirements created the slowest freight train that everyone saw coming and no one did anything about.
That said, I was clear that I think pilots overplayed their hand about a year ago and their contracts at all of the airlines were too rich to be sustainable. Southwest just finished their pilot deal only to suspend hiring including those with an active offer.
Spirit and Frontier wanted to join forces to combine pilot pools and aircraft to grow. JetBlue broke up that party with an offer Spirit shareholders couldn’t resist, but it was unequivocally a different deal. JetBlue was clear that it wanted to acquire Spirit for crew (including pilots) and aircraft. The market uniformly agreed it overpaid but it highlighted that every airline needed to look at its pilot pipeline.
At one point, despite American Airlines pilots already securing the best deal in the aviation industry, United offered yet a better contract and on cue, American Airlines deal was instantly inferior and upped to a $10 bn package for the labor block a month after the prior landmark deal.
“Across the board, airlines are hiring fewer pilots than before, with many claiming that the highly-anticipated pilot shortage has been blown significantly out of proportion.” – Simpleflying
Are these issues a sign that the travel market is softening or that pilots may have contracts to lucrative to maintain? I’d argue that one leads to the next. JetBlue is “shrinking to grow”, Spirit is selling some aircraft even as it waits for new arrivals from Airbus pending engine issues, and frankly it baffles me that revenge travel has been sustained as long as it has. But at some point demand has to fall despite its resiliency in the face of 20% inflation since 2019. And when it does, are these not the signs of what that looks like?
Conclusion
It’s possible that these are all unrelated issues, but it seems too widespread to ignore. The richest contracts for pilots went to American, United, and Delta tenured captains and those carriers have not yet signaled the same. Between Airbus and Boeing, every airline has an excuse to cut frequencies and routes with impunity and that may mask lower overall demand. Regardless, the nation’s pilots had a great year last year, but this year and the years to come, may not be as strong as predicted.
What do you think?
Signs of coming recession .
LMAO. People have been talking about an imminent recession since the last one. Invest and chill.
Great minds think alike. For some reason, there’s been massive layoffs going on for the past 6 months. Executives go golfing and if they hear one of them say “I’m laying off 1000, FORE!” then the others jump on the bandwagon.
It was similar with COVID: Instead of one CEO perhaps not going along with the herd and saying: “Wow! All those airlines furloughing their pilots, maybe I should grab ’em, keep their training up, and then I’ll be poised for the recovery”, they just followed along.
Having worked in corporate America and seeing how the sausage is ground, it’s my experienced opinion that American executives are largely just political hacks with poor business acumen.
I can confirm Gary Leff is wrong . Inside airlines he is considered a goon and a bad writer. Your best bet is never quote him or anything he posts.
JetBlue offered UP TO 350 incentive lines .. paying pilots less not to fly and the reason isn’t because they don’t need pilots or they are shrinking. Everything going on has to do with aircraft deliveries. What will happen is when deliveries heat up and aircraft are no longer grounded (A321 Neo for some , 737 max for others ) there will be mass demand again. What so you do when part of your fleet is grounded and aircraft deliveries aren’t coming ? Media press is so wrong about reasons and motives on how literally anything happens in aviation. Smart to use incentive lines. M. It’s cheaper than furlough … keeps pilots flying (since you probably wont get an incentive line every month ) and allows the airline flexibility.
Actual incentive lines offered were somewhere in the low to mid 200s. JetBlue is making big investments to bring back aircraft from the desert and complete C checks … quite the opposite of just a shrinking airline.
@RP22 –
1) You may have insight that others do not, and I appreciate and respect that.
2) Gary has a lot of takes, but as you’ll notice he is citing someone else who announced it on X. I do respect him but none of us get it right ever time, and he may be wrong on this one. I couldn’t say.
3) The delivery issue may be part of the puzzle but they have also been rather public about vacating routes and stations that are not optimally profitable. That could be combined with the equipment issue but time will tell.
4) I think it would be fair to assume some of what you’ve said could be true, but I think it would also be fair to say that JetBlue’s financial and operational performance may suggest that it’s not all roses at B6 simply waiting for new arriving aircraft.
These voluntary incentive lines were an arrangement agreed upon between the union and management to mitigate the recurring delivery delays in addition to the PW GTF issues which will cause several airframes to be out of service in the coming year. All this was hashed out in October and was always expected long before RH left or Carl I invested. In other words the entire premise behind these VILs has been misreported.
Almost all these slow downs are due to aircraft shortages. It’s extremely obvious with WN, they can’t get new Max quick enough or at all. frontier and spirit same issue but with airbus and their PW engines being grounded. Ravn just has horrible management who’s blowing all their money on a pipe dream called Northern Pacific or whatever they call it now. Lastly FedEx just over expanded during Covid and is in pilot negotiations they’ll be fine in the long run. No the ceiling isn’t falling.
The Party’s Over, it’s time to call it a day.
They’ve burst your pretty balloon and taken the moon away.
It’s time to wind up the masquerade.
Just make your mind up the piper must be paid.
(Courtesy of Comden and Green)
Everything on the boarding area that is posted about anything regarding pilot shortages, overages or pay and contracts is mis-understood by these self-proclaimed experts. Why do readers think that because people know how to maximize their credit card rewards and fly business class for free….they understand anything about in inter-working of airline business and pilot life. 100% false about the pilot shortage and the future. Current reasons are due to aircraft delivery delays and A321NEO/737MAX issues.
@alert–been hearing this for years… glad I kept my stock portfolio that is up 41% since I was told by everyone to dump my stocks.
Again ANY pilot still working after 65, or even close to it, made some poor financial choices in their life. What did they invest in during the past 40 years? Hookers & Blow?
Maybe they enjoy flying. Everyone doensn’t hate their job. A lot of people work well into their 70s and they have plenty of money to retire if they want to.
Define “A lot”. It’s a few at most, the rest working past 62-65 fall into the category I mentioned.
I will agree there are those that have enough to retire but for some reason feel they can’t spend it and want to leave it to their kids. Morons.
It seems the more prestigious and high-paying the job is the more these people work well past retirement age. Jamie Dimon, ceo of Chase, is 67 and still working. He has 2 billion. Nick Sabin retired at 72. Belichick is applying for jobs at 71. Chris Wallace is still working at 76. Clint Eastwood was directing movies at a very old age. All these people could have retired years before they did. Some decades.
There was someone at work who retired and was bored so she came back.
The people who can retire don’t and the people who just do their job for money, can’t retire early.
I LOVE flying!!! I will not work a day passed 65… that is my hard rule… ultimate goal is 60.
As others have said, airframe delivery and engine issues have crimped airlines’ ability to fly as much as they otherwise would have. According to Cirium, in 2023 there were over 500 RJs parked because regionals don’t have the crews available to fly them. Maybe they don’t all come back into revenue service, but there is some portion that could represent profitable flying if they had crews available. While there may or may not be adjustments to the retirement age for pilots, there is a significant block of pilots who will be retiring over the next 10 – 20 years regardless of 65/67 who will need to be backfilled to sustain the current level of flying. This is topsy turvy industry but to respond to the headline, I don’t think the pilot shortage is over.
@Matthew – Valid point and a possible answer. That said, JetBlue has enough pilots to pay them to stay at home and park planes so if it was an issue of lack of crews, that’s not the case at JetBlue. That said, the others (especially United) would have plenty of equipment reasons too.
The author of this article is not an actual airline pilot who has to share a cockpit with an inexperienced, less than 1500 hour pilot and not in any position to pass judgement on piloting issues. It takes a special kind of arrogance for non pilot bloggers to think they have any expertise in these areas.
I bet the families of the Colgan crash victims think the 1500 hour rule is poorly thought out also.
@Nick – As I’m sure you’ll recall, the captain of Colgan 3407 had 3,379 flight hours, and the first officer 2,244 hours – both well exceeding the 1,500 flight hour requirement congress set out. It’s the definition of arbitrary.
The “1500 hour rule” was about far more than just flight time, that’s a media talking point and an excuse. 1500 hours have been the minimum for an ATP for decades and, up until very recently, no major airline would even give pilots with less than 4-5000 hours the time of day. In fact, I flew for a regional that is now an AA wholly owned and you’d have been lucky to get a call from them with less than 2-3000 hours not long ago. Arguably, it’s far easier to obtain an ATP now than it ever has been with the Restricted ATP made possible by the so-called 1500 rule. Any Captain out there who flew with 250 hour FOs with wet commercials back in the day understand how much the industry has improved safety-wise since the changes implemented after Colgan. These rules are written in blood. A lot of it.
The Boeing Max issue may be playing a role also with undetermined delivery dates, possible cancelled orders etc. The uncertainty’s about the election and economy is certainly part of it as well.
@Kyle… JetBlue has A321NEOs parked for the next year AND A220/321 delivery delays… That is the reason they have enough pilots. They are spending $$ to bring back parked planes.
@Kyle the FO at Colgan had a Commercial.. not ATP certificate. The 1500 hour rule was designed to assure all candidates can earn an ATP rating before flying for a 121 carrier or as part of their 121 training. The completely uneducated media from the outside looking in judges the 1500 rule as arbitrary…but fort some reason it works. Since 2008 Colgan Air incident , name the last time a Part 121 US carrier caused a crash that resulted in a death due to pilot error….THEN name the last time we went 16 years with 0….. ANSWER NEVER!! so you know what? Let’s just keep it. It freaking works. Why cant you bloggers just stick to covering free breakfast buffets and mileage devaluations? It is constant misinformation to the general public on these forums.
Scott Kirby talks a really good game but the reality according to an article in Flight Global is on February 29th in a filing with the SEC United stated they are expecting 102 fewer aircraft deliveries in 2024. They were originally expecting 165 total deliveries now they will only get 63 aircraft delivered in 2024 and these aircraft delivery delays are expected to continue into 2025. With 102 aircraft now not being delivered in 2024 and United having already hired the pilots to fly those 102 aircraft they are over staffed. I can’t see United continuing to hire pilots at the rate they were doing in 2022 and 2023. Kirby loves to hear himself talk, he loves to put a spin on every story but the truth is United expects zero Max 10 deliveries in 2024, UnitedNext is being forced into a holding pattern because of the MAX10 certification delays. United there is clarity on what’s going on with the MAX10 I believe United will quietly suspend pilot hiring despite the rosy picture Kirby continues to try and paint.
Your opinion is off target. The market has changed, the Ultra Low Cost Carrier model is failing, that is driving those carriers to have issues. Some carriers have numerous airbus aircraft grounded long term for problems with engines, thus don’t need as many pilots currently. However, that flying is being taken over by the Legacies. As for Southwest and several other carriers, the issue is not demand or over hiring, the issue is the delay in Boeing Max aircraft production…no additional airplanes equals no need for the additional pilots. It’s not that they over hired, or overplayed their hand, it’s mostly a lull in hiring as a result of aircraft availability, not demand. The pilot shortage is not over, it’s just going to slow until the aircraft are available.
Absolutely awful take on pilot contracts, 1500-hour rule and 67. The 1500 hour rule has been the single best thing to avoid oversaturation of pilot supply and has enabled the new contracts. It’s one of the best things that’s happened to this profession.
Even with what you consider pilot overreach, we still aren’t where we were at in the 90s-2000 when you adjust for inflation. According to you, pilots should incrementally accept a worse QoL and worse pay because of reasons. UAL and DAL just made record profits and profit sharing for FY23. The numbers don’t support your theories, bottom line.
The hiring pause is for two obvious reasons – softening of post-COVID demand, especially in the ULCC and cheap ticket arena. That’s why you see ULCC and SWA struggling and the legacy airlines are still selling full-rate tickets like hotcakes. The lower income crowd is running out of free money to travel, and the legacy customer is not. The second reason is MAX and 321NEO supply problems. No airline will hire people without airplanes for them to fly. The pause will last as long as it takes for Airbus to figure out their P&W GTF supply problems, and for Boeing to pull their head out of their ass with the QC/QA production issues.
@Smokus – Thank you for your comment. There are some conflicting views here that should be addressed.
On the one hand, you say that the 1500-hour rule is the single best thing to avoid “over saturation” but then you also acknowledge that there was a pilot shortage. It can’t be both the reason everything is perfect and the reason that there’s a problem. And not a single airline nor pilot signing to those new contracts would contradict that there’s a pilot shortage.
So those two cannot both be.
Secondly, the hiring pause you say is because of softening post-COVID demand and the ULCC model. You then also suggest that Southwest is a ULCC model like Spirit but it is not. It hasn’t been for some time, and its approach for coach is a premium to the rest of the market including the legacies at this point. Further, if this is all true, that the ULCC model is seeing less of a demand but that aircraft power plants are to blame too, then it seems like the ULCC reasoning is convenient when you don’t like that and the power plant issue is valid for everyone else. Is it possible that the whole market is softening?
Looks like the pilots really overplayed their hand. These contracts are too rich. Delta only posted a record year of over $5 billion income.
https://ir.delta.com/news/news-details/2024/Delta-Air-Lines-Announces-December-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2023-Financial-Results/default.aspx
Sure every year will remain at peak travel too, right?