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Comment by akiselev | Hacker News Reader

The pilot shortage is all up and down the stack, including in GA [1], commercial, and military. There simply isn’t enough pilots anywhere in the pipeline. It doesn’t help that most PPLs tend towards wealthy professionals who sure as hell aren’t sitting in an aluminum tube nonstop six to twenty hours at a time. Instead of using pilots’ love of flying to siphon off recruits from other professions theyve used it to keep salaries down just like the gaming industry. You reap what you sow.

It’s going to take a generation of higher salaries to build that pipeline back out. Instead they just want to drop a pilot. F that.

[1] private pilots make up part of our natural disaster infrastructure and the FAA has long been trying to get more people into aviation because that’s going to be a painful shortage if i.e. the big one hits the Seattle area and most of rhe highways get eaten by sand

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The sad thing about GA is that it’s just so cost prohibitive. You’re talking tens of thousands of dollars just to get the basic license, and even then it’s not that practically useful (you can’t even fly at night or in weather without an instrument rating). I would love to get my PP, but even in a well-paying field it’s just inaccessible without dedicating a lot more than I’m ready to give.

The GA manufacturing industry seems to have entered death spiral. With the fall in popularity of GA, the number of planes made every year went way down which drove the price of both new and used planes up. We went from producing almost 20,000 GA planes a year in the 1970s to under a thousand a year in the 1990s and it's barely recovered since then (1,500 a year IIRC)

Let me guess, the nadir happened in 1971?

You can get the JAR-PPL SEP license for 10k exactly here in Europe (Spain -prepaid course) and everyone tells me that the US is cheaper.

It's expensive yes but not out of reach of most people.

Once you start looking into CPL, night rating, multiple engine etc that's when it gets expensive.

> you can’t even fly at night or in weather without an instrument rating

Minor nit: You can fly at night with a Private Pilot's certificate, but it must be under VFR like all your daytime flying.

This differs in Europe, where some NAA's view night flying as equivalent to IFR.

Europe is weird about private license; so much so that a vast majority of people in Europe instead travel to the US for a few months to learn flying.

Night flying over LA is great; night flight over the desert or the Midwest away from cities can be effectively IFR; VFR private licenses require some IFR time but I highly recommend spending some time on instruments if you’re going to VFR at night.

And VFR over the top at night I just don’t recommend unless you have an IFR rating.

One of the problems is the way certain airlines, and commercial aviation in general, started to pay and employ pilots. Gone are the days of airline employed initial pilot training. Gone are the days, in some cases, of airline paid type rating training. Which turned the job of an airline pilot into quite a shitty one, especially considering the amount of responsibility pilots have.

Pushing for single pilot flight will only make it worse.

> There simply isn’t enough pilots anywhere in the pipeline.

Really? Can you back that up with some reference somewhere?

From talking to aspiring airline pilots, it seems that their career trajectory is terrible until they actually land their butt in the seat of a major airline plane.

How can we have such a shortage of pilots and at the same time have such lousy pay and working conditions for the infeed?

See the FAA's US Civil Airmen Statistics spreadsheet for the overall big picture [1]. Specifically, the "Pilot Total w/o Student Category" fell from 490k in 2012 to 470k in 2021, despite the number of instructors growing from 98k to 121k. The number of students has skyrocketed from 120k in 2012 to 250k in 2021 but it's just not translating to commercially viable pilots: we added 30k students last year but lost several hundred airline pilots and only gained 600 commercial pilots. The number of PPLs fell from 188k in 2012 to 161k in 2021.

[1] https://www.faa.gov/data_research/aviation_data_statistics/c...

Not sure if sarcasm, but are you asking how there is a shortage in airline pilots when the incentives to start looking at a career in the field are terrible?

No, they're wondering why the market isn't responding to the shortage by increasing compensation, if the shortage is genuine.

Precisely. The working conditions for the infeed are terrible for pilots as well as flight attendants.

A friend went through flight attendent training recently. She did very well but eventually dropped out when the total compensation was small and didn't include things like the rent you pay to "hot bunk" at wherever you wind up stationed. Compensation also didn't include things like paying for your attorney if you are sued while working for the airline.

So many "shortages" are like the "shortage" of engineers. No, there are plenty of engineers--just none willing to put up with your bullshit at that price.

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