Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

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It's not so much the cost of learning to fly that is dissuading people from becoming pilots. Yes it's much more expensive than it was just 20 years ago, and way more expensive than 40 years ago... but the biggest problem was that until these current pilots started retiring, it was actually a slow climb (pardon the pun) to get to a good flying job.

You had to start with whatever small regional airline or cargo company you could get to accumulate hours, and eventually you could get into the airlines. Until the last 10 years or so, there wasn't really a shortage of pilots in the airlines.

Plus, as we know, non-executive salaries haven't been keeping pace with inflation. And perks and retirement benefits have been shrinking. So it's less attractive now to become a commercial pilot than it was 20+ years ago.

A couple of other factors are also involved. 1. The US economy has shifted away from trade/skilled jobs and into information jobs. 2. Many pilots of the past learned to fly in the military; but since WW2, we've had less and less need for pilots - especially now that we are moving a lot of activity to remotely piloted drones.

I expect that as commercial pilot jobs become more attractive (due to not enough applicants), the salaries may go up, and the interest will redevelop.

Exactly. This is just like the "we have a shortage of truck drivers" non-problem. What we have is a shortage of people willing to pay a bunch of up-front costs for a job with relatively low pay, poor work-life balance, and a lot less prestige than it used to have. If airlines paid more and treated pilots better, the shortage would disappear.

That being said, airline margins these days are so tight that it wouldn't surprise me to start seeing pushes for alternatives to raising pilot compensation. Anything from remote piloting and self-flying aircraft to lowering entry requirements is probably being discussed in board rooms right now.

> That being said, airline margins these days are so tight that it wouldn't surprise me to start seeing pushes for alternatives to raising pilot compensation.

I guess (a) reducing margins, (b) cutting executive pay, and/or (c) raising prices are all non-starters.

Pilots make 6 figures, don't they?

Eventually. First you have to pay for your training. If you want to work for a major airline you also need a college degree. After that, you become a flight instructor and earn $20-30k and rack up some flight time. You then need to spend several years coming up with 1500 hours of flight time, either through instructing, flying charters, or simply paying to rent a plane. If you need to pay to rent or buy the plane, you're looking at $80k minimum to get buy the final 1000 hours.

Assuming the economy is doing well, you can go get a regional airline job. Today it will pay $40k to start, but if the economy falters, there will be an excess of pilots, and those that are lucky enough to have an airline job will be getting $25k like they used to.

Finally, after some years of this, you'll move to a major airline and start finally making good money. All the while, you're often away from your family, living an unhealthy lifestyle, exposed to radiation, and if you ever have any significant illness or require most any medication, your career is over, and you have to apply all of those jet pilot skills to something else.

If you're 18 and starting your training today, you have 47 years to retirement, and it's very likely that less than half way through your career, automation and remote piloting will have advanced enough that many planes will only require one pilot, causing a collapse in the demand for airline pilots and wrecking salaries.

But hey, you get to fly for a living!

There's no chance that automation will advance such that you only need one pilot. The pilots job is to babysit the machine, hardware and software. And you need two for the obvious reason that sometimes one is incapacitated. More complex software increases the need for two pilots.

Airbus is openly working on it. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/28/airbus-pushing-ahead-in-tech...

If you go back to the 1940s, some big aircraft had five flight crew for long-range flights. They progressively dropped the navigator, then the flight engineer in the 80s, because computers could do their jobs. Many small business jets already can fly legally with a single pilot.

When automation reaches the point that the computer can fly the entire flight, and the pilot merely needs to monitor, as we are close to with this new Garmin autoland system, the pilot incapacitation argument for having two crew members goes away. It's inevitable and just a matter of time.

There are some strange corner cases out there:

> Already requested and had the data linked chart for our landing weight sent up to the aircraft: we require 5,671 feet on a wet runway, good braking, zero tailwind. Each knot of tailwind adds 150 to the distance required, so even one knot of tailwind exceeds the runway length.

* https://jethead.wordpress.com/2014/12/13/flying-a-jet-in-the...

Interesting story, but the FMS already can calculate the required distances in various scenarios. I'm not aware of an FMS that can do the what-if type analysis automatically about the range of acceptable wind directions and speeds, but that can certainly be built.

Instead of the F/O flying the approach, he could simply have let the autopilot do the whole thing and focus himself, as he did, on the strategic aspects of the flight.

> And you need two for the obvious reason that sometimes one is incapacitated

See the new Garmin/Cirrus/Piper "autoland" feature. Obviously GA is very different from Commercial, but there are definitely people in the industry working on this.

It takes a long time to get there. You need thousands of flight hours and you need to have been at the same airline for a long time. Pilot perks, benefits, and salary are all based on seniority. If you switch airlines, you start almost at the bottom again. It's not at all like software engineering where switching jobs is often the best way to get a salary boost.

No, starting was $18,000/year until the FAA 1,200/1,500 hour experience rule.

Now it's around $30,000/year with a college degree. (Yeah, seriously.)

Experienced captains make $200,000 based on union senority, or $300,000+ in Asia for expats.

Some do http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines

6 figures is nothing these days, especially when you have to go through flight school, accumulate debt for that, and the slog at a low end regional job for many years of $30-40k salaries.

Depends on where you live. In much of the midwest six figures can let you live like a South American druglord. Of course a pilot may never be home.

> In much of the midwest six figures can let you live like a South American druglord.

But how much does it cost to live like a druglord in South America?

Depending on where exactly in South America, anywhere between 6-8 figures?

That means South America is likely more expensive than the Midwest. I was trying (poorly) to make a joke about that juxtaposition.

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