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Comment by sottol | Hacker News Reader

This feels like the epitome of capitalist short-sightedness. There must be a way to build loyalty with your pilots by treating them well during the downturns and spending more on training pilots? It feels like there are massive layoffs and cost and pay reductions every 3 years, just to be followed by a boom shortly after and complete shortage of pilots.

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Many long-term skilled labor positions have this handled with a generous salary, not treating the skilled labor like bus drivers picking up extra routes for some nominal pay increase that period.

Well, in a few years when business goes south, they go through bankruptcy, the pilots lose their pensions and the cycle restarts.

Pensions are typically protected as a separate entity, not tied to the fate of the company. The corporation pays into a fund, and the pension invests that money into something that pays out a guaranteed dividend in perpetuity. Some pensions may exist that are managed by the company (like social security, if you consider the government a company) but the majority are not.

The major issue is probably government. The FAA has a mandatory retirement age of 65. It also requires substantially more hours to fly commercial than European countries. Both arguably marginally increase safety but at a very high cost.

But the airlines did lay off too many pilots during COVID.

The total number of registered pilots (general aviation included) has fallen almost 10% since 2013 [1]. There are simply far fewer pilots in the pipeline, which effects everyone downstream including airlines and military, even while the number of instructors has increased.

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

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