Industry Insight Special Report
Glamour of cockpit fades for millennials
The Asia-Pacific’s multi-billion dollar investment in pilot training looks set to meet forecast demand. Other crew management issues are harder to address. Senior captains and first officers are naming their price at Mainland airlines and getting it, putting additional pressure on pilot costs while industry providers are calling for a set of modern global standards to be applied to all training academies worldwide. Chief correspondent, Tom Ballantyne, reports.
July 1st 2018
Flight training academies are under pressure to increase their graduate numbers as forecasters agree more than 637,000 new cockpit crew will be needed to fly the global airline fleet in the next two decades. Read More » As always, the Asia-Pacific is at the top of the demand table, with its requirement of 253,000 new pilots – 40% of global take up - to 2036.
Fears about a pilot shortage are receding for the region as more airlines and academies establish or expand their graduate output to meet forecast aviation growth.
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Expanded training facilities intended to meet future regional demand is the largest part of the story, but it is not the only issue at play in addressing cockpit manpower trends. The much discussed pilot shortage is not only about insufficient numbers of direct entry pilots.
Association of Asia-Pacific Airlines (AAPA) director general, Andrew Herdman, told Orient Aviation last month: “When I hear talk about pilot shortages I think it reflects the pressure airlines feel when there is movement in the pilot community and upward pressure on salaries.
“Pilots are moving around, which is the big factor, especially in our part of the world where expatriate pilots are 10% of the workforce. Airlines are feeling the pressure on pilot salaries, particularly in lower cost countries. There is a bidding war going on.”
It has happened in the past, Herdman said, when fast expanding Gulf carriers poached pilots from competitors across the world, again particularly in Asia, with big salary offers. With a slowdown in the Gulf that has eased only to be replaced by China.
“The Chinese market is enormous with its half a billion passengers. It’s been growing at double digit rates for the last two decades. Roughly 10% of the pilots operating in China are expatriates. “China is recruiting a lot of pilots and some of them are from the major Asian carriers, although Mainland airlines are advertising world-wide,” he said.
“If an airline is suffering a pilot shortfall it may not be a result of a shortage of pilots but more of a reflection of carrier’s international competitiveness in salary packages.
“If you are out of line you will be losing pilots and losing trained pilots is a much bigger headache than how many pilots you need to train. If you lose senior first officers and captains they can’t be replaced easily, particularly as many airlines don’t employ direct entry captains,” Herdman said.
‘There seems to be a lot of changes and a lot of complexities that were brought in as the result of perceived shortcomings in training quality. It would be interesting to see the industry address it from the perspective of training programs rather than changing requirements as a result of something missing,’’ said Flight Safety International training manager, Nancy Ritter. “Also, it would be nice if the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and others got together and said: ‘we’re just putting band-aids on the back end of it. Can we look at some of the things we can do. We may still be training people as we did 40 years ago. Is that the most efficient way to train them right now? “The answer is probably not. We could talk to the educational community, the IT community and the new technology community to find out if we could do a better job of reaching pilots from the very beginning. We could work out what the footprint would look like and how it would apply across a wider set of countries or regions.” |
Most industry insiders believed airlines and training academies are preparing for future crew demand. In the Asia-Pacific, there has been substantial investment in pilot training, including airlines. Qantas Airways is building its own US$15.6 million pilot academy that will open next year.
Last month it announced a short list of nine regional Australian centres being considered for the academy. Initially planned to graduate 100 pilots a year, it is planned to expand to training to 500 cockpit crew annually. Qantas Group pilot academy executive manager, Wes Nobelius, said last month the company would make a decision on the site by September. He added a second academy site already was being considered by the Qantas group.
Singapore Airlines (SIA) is expanding its pilot training operations with separate joint ventures with Airbus and Canadian simulator manufacturer and training provider, CAE. The airline and CAE will establish a joint venture training company that initially focus on simulator training for Boeing aircraft and support of SIA and airline’s pilot training requirements.
Located in the Singapore Airlines Training Centre (STC) near Changi Airport it will offer initial type rating and recurrent training programs for B737 MAXs, B747, B777 and B787 Boeing aircraft.
“We are fortunate we are not facing any immediate pilot shortage however, we have taken practical steps to increase training,” SIA CEO, Goh Choon Phong, has said. “This is all part of our continued efforts to provide training for the industry because we train more than for SIA but also for the overall airlines with Airbus. And in the case of CAE, we similarly will continue to play our part in training the pilots required.”
Airbus Flight Crew Training Solutions Manager, Customer Services, Susannah Crabol, said the European plane maker has been increasing its training network in recent years. Five years ago it had training centres in Miami, Toulouse and Beijing.
In 2016, it opened the joint venture Airbus Training Centre in Singapore with Singapore Airlines and is increasing the number of Full Flight Simulators (FFS) at the centre. “We’ve just delivered a second A350 FFS, which brings the total FFS [at the training centre] to seven.”
Business is booming, Crabol said. “We obviously have to look to further expand for the future because there is a limit to what we are able to provide. We need to meet that demand for us, the airlines, the airports and all the actors in the industry. We have to get the pilots trained,” she said.
Airbus’s Hua-Ou Aviation Training Centre in Beijing provides training for most Chinese airlines as well as carriers from Asia, Europe and other regions worldwide. Established in 1997, the joint venture with China Aviation Supplies Import & Export Corporation (CASC), has trained more than 24,000 pilots, cabin crew, flight operations personnel and maintenance and structure technicians from 30 airlines.
“We know the high requirement for training in the region to meet the delivery of aircraft that we have and in general,” said Crabol. As well as Singapore and Beijing, Airbus also conducts training in Jakarta with Lion Air for Airbus and Boeing jets and ATR turboprops.
A new Vietnam Training Centre is under construction and will open next year as will another centre outside Delhi. “We always have projects going on in the region and are looking to expand,” Crabol said.
China’s authorities are keenly aware that the country’s airlines need many more pilots. In an attempt to address the issue, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) relaxed some of the requirements to attract recruits. The Mainland regulator said the existing standards, established in 2006, were outdated “due to technological developments and general improvements in health”. One of the biggest changes is less stringent eyesight rules. The standard for uncorrected distance vision is decreased from 0.3 to 0.1 although corrected visin remained at 0.1. Potential pilot cadets who have had vision correction surgery can now be accepted into cadet pilot training as long as they meet certain requirements. Pilot candidates with short sight of less than 450 degrees and far sight of less than 300 degrees can now take the pilot candidate medical examination six months after vision correction surgery. An article published on the Civil Aviation Medical Centre website said shortsightedness was the most common reason for keeping young people out of the cockpit. A World Health Organisation study revealed that almost 50% of Mainland Chinese are shortsighted. At the high school and college level, more than 70% of students are shortsighted and the numbers are climbing. Poor eyesight is the biggest contributing factor to the elimination rate at the cadet pilot medical examination. Since last December, airlines have been able to set a lower height limit for the pilots they recruit. Before the revision of the regulations, all cadet applicants had to be taller than 165 cms and have legs longer than 74 cm to proceed past medical checks. |
In its 2017-2036 Pilot and Technician Outlook, which will be updated at the end of this month, Boeing predicted the airline industry will need 637,000 new commercial airline pilots in the next two decades. The Asia-Pacific topped the list with a forecast requirement for 253,000 new cockpit crew followed by North America (117,000), Europe (106,000), the Middle East (63,000), Latin America (52,000), Africa (24,000) and CIS (22,000).
Boeing has simulator facilities in Shanghai (B747, B757/767, B787), Seoul’s domestic airport at Gimpo (B777) and Incheon International Airport (B7377) in South Korea, Singapore (B737, B777, B787 and Airbus A320) and in Australia at Brisbane (B717 and B737) and Melbourne (B737 and A320).
Global training academy company, U.S.-headquartered FlightSafety International, which offers ab initio training programs, has been serving Asian airlines since the 1950s and Mainland China since the early 1990s.
“We train about 200 or a little more per year from China. We also train a high number from South Korea. They come to Vero Beach (on Florida’s Atlantic coast north of Fort Lauderdale),” FlightSafety Learning Center manager in Orlando, Nancy Ritter, said.
“For China and for many countries in Asia, airspace for general aviation use is severely restricted. They don’t have the infrastructure to fly general aviation (GA) traffic around the country, Ritter said. “Secondly, many air ways systems are not developed to the extent where they could handle low level traffic versus jet traffic.”
FlightSafety is one of the world’s largest training organizations, with more than 1,800 instructors that provide more than 1.3 million hours of approved training annually on 135 aircraft models. It has customers in 167 countries and independent territories and operates 300 FFS.
“There is a need to increase standardization in pilot training,” said FlightSafety’s Ritter. “Differences between regions and countries are increasing rather than decreasing. From a flight training provider perspective, the opportunity for non-conforming training is much higher today than it would have been even five years ago.
AAPA’s Herdman told Orient Aviation he is comfortable the private sector will respond to the pilot shortage issue with capacity and that simulator capacity will be adequate. “But all of us are going to have pressures that pilots are internationally mobile and in order to attract and retain them you have to pay internationally competitive salaries. That is the pressure you are seeing rippling through different types of airlines in various countries around the world,” he said.
“I am confident the private sector is up to the challenge but that won’t take away the pressures we are discussing. The industry continues to grow and it is an issue airline management has to focus on.
“Training your own pilots is clearly a response to that. So you see investments by airlines in expanding, sometimes on their own, but often in JVs. Also, stand-alone operations see this as a business opportunity and are happy to train pilots from other airlines.”
A recent example of this trend is L3 Commercial Training Solutions’ (L3 CTS) Jetstar Asia Airways Cadet Pilot Training Program launched in February this year. The cadets are trained at ground school in Singapore and then in Hamilton New Zealand. “With the formalization of the agreement with L3 CTS, we will be continually developing and training highly skilled pilots to augment our in-house talent pool,” said Jetstar Asia’s Head of Flying Operations, Chan Choy Kee.
The need for global pilot training standards is under constant discussion in the sector. At Airbus Crabol said the company maintained an Airbus Flight Training Reference, “a standard we are implement across the world”.
“There are distinct differences in training requirements at airlines and authorities as you can imagine. The aim is to implement a certain standard that is accepted by authorities to make sure the competence of pilots is raised.
“Part of this is an increase in the training network and also the implementation of competency-based training programs, which is becoming an International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) requirement.
“We have met this goal in our type rating for the A320 and A330 programs. The programs start at intermediate level where we offer modular based training tailored to the skills of individual pilots. The training program has self-study at home and allows students to achieve the nine pilot competencies necessary for fly the relevant aircraft,” said Crabol.
Airbus uses its ACE (Airbus Cockpit Experience) trainer, a laptop training device where pilots can train in free play and familiarize themselves with the cockpit and procedures. “ACE reduces time to flight rating and has been approved worldwide; most recently by Brazil but also in China and Indonesia.
“It allows us to meet demand in training and also offer the level of training required. It’s of utmost concern to all that the pilots we produce have the competencies required. It’s a global aim that addresses the network, content and our training philosophy.”
Another issue facing airlines is that potential cadets no longer see aviation as a glamorous. In 2018, bright young students are applying to high tech industries rather than airlines as a career choice.
At the International Air Transport Association annual general meeting in Sydney last month, Qantas Airways group CEO, Alan Joyce, urged the industry to persuade educational establishments to offer students –both women and men - more subjects suited to flying careers
Flight Safety’s Ritter told Orient Aviation: “I see so many airlines, particularly here in the States, who address this issue. They do so by their grass roots commitment as a company or a specific airline.
“What I don’t see is the industry, as a whole, producing guidelines all companies can adopt to promote aviation to young people. We could have a better return on our investment if we went out as an industry with information the next generation needs to know about us.Some airlines are doing a really remarkable job with it. Some other companies don’t even know where to start.
At present, Flight Safety knows of pilot shortages at its customers in Asia, said Ritter. “Demand is much greater than capacity particularly for schools approved by the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC),” she said. Airlines are nervous and are asking themselves if they can train as many pilots as they need. There are not a lot of new CAAC schools being added to the list and that is a definite item of concern.
Both Airbus and Boeing do not want to see their aircraft parked because of pilot shortages. “It’s a discussion which comes up very often in the industry,” said Crabol. “We know we need more women in aviation. Again, this is an issue where we may need more input from airlines. The job, the career, the profile has changed a lot from the pilot profile of many years ago. This has led to a change in cadets today who apply,” she said.
“We have a different airline profile and therefore a different career profile. We want to work with airlines to decide how we can make a career as a pilot appealing. There has been a shift. Be it the competency, be it the level of instructors or be it career path management. We have to entice people back to aviation to a certain extent. ”
International Air Transport Association (IATA) director general and CEO, Alexandre de Juniac, said at the most recent IATA AGM that crew shortages are starting to be a problem in some parts of the world. If they continued it would become a problem to more airlines. IATA is working with others at “dimensioning properly” the training system. “I am confident they (airlines) are taking appropriate measures,” he said.
Is safety threatened by any shortfall in experienced pilots? Herdman said: “I don’t see the two things being related. There is some discussion about experience levels. By the same token, pilot communities are concerned about the number of years it can take to reach command and that tends to ebb and flow depending on the supply and demand of pilots and their relative growth rates,” he said.
“But overall the safety agenda is independent of any of these considerations. I don’t have any concerns on that score.”
