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Comment by missedthecue | Hacker News Reader

Another good example of this is airline captains. There's a big shortage right now, and simply paying more doesn't give a junior pilots 5,000 more hours in their logbook. They actually have to fly those hours first before they can become a captain. Also, pilots have a hard retirement cutoff for obvious reasons, so you can't even lure them back into work with dollars.

Airlines are paying more and more for captains, but it's not solving the shortage. They're just poaching them from each other, the total vacancies stays the same.

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Junior pilots also don't come from nowhere. Just to get to flying an airliner, you need many hundreds of hours of training and studying, and that's not cheap either. And from what I recall, when you look at how much your average pilot is paid when they just start out, and the harshness of the schedule, and it's not a very attractive job for people.

So I think with airlines, it is still very much a case of a pay shortage.

I looked into it as a career path a many moons ago; I’d probably just now be making captain at a major if I’d gone that route and did everything right. I was definitely turned off by the pay.

Regional pilots, where you do your time if you didn’t join the military, get paid absolute peanuts. You’re looking at a career that pays well under average for most of your younger years, for very skilled labor, then tops out at about the pay of a mid-level software engineer. And you have a terrible schedule and are on call pretty much all the time, so good luck with a family. Oh and if you screw up, you get a mark on your record you have to justify at every interview for the rest of your career—if you’re lucky and nobody died. Not to mention all the layoffs over the years, where you have to keep current when nobody is hiring.

Airline pilots are a good example of pay shortage. Making newbies have a shit pay to quality of life ratio in the hopes that you get picked up by a big airliner and finally earn decent pay.

Why make that kind of investment and take that risk and spend your 20s with a shit quality of life if you have better options?

This is true on the supply side, but an airline can raise ticket prices until they have the right amount of pilots for the number of tickets they are selling leaving no shortage. These excess profits can be funneled back into to training programs to increase future capacity.

Yes, if you force demand levels off a cliff, you can cure a labor shortage. But it's still a labor shortage. I'm not sure why HN is saying there is no such thing as a labor shortage.

If you lower the incentives to the point that nobody wants to do what you are incentivising anymore, that isn't a people shortage its a incentive shortage. That is true even if the thing you want people to do takes years to accomplish.

The boom & bust cycles of the airline industry is the fatal problem. Entry level pilots are paid dirt wages while having to self fund massive training expenses. The last time I looked, the training ran far in excess of $100k with entry level jobs at regional airlines paying around $20k/year. Since then, the FAA has required much more hours of flying time before qualifying to fly passengers.

Changing jobs as a pilot sets you back to square one with seniority and pay. There's no way to change companies and get raises - like one can do as a software developer.

I'm surprised there's a shortage, I picture being a pilot as a very desirable career that would lead to an oversupply. Is it because learning to fly is too expensive for many of the people who want to do it?

That's part of it. The US airline industry expects pilot candidates to apply when they already have the necessary FAA licenses and flight hours. To reach that point, pilots have to either serve in the military for 7+ years or take on a huge amount of student debt. If the airlines had instead maintained a pipeline by hiring trainees and then paying them to get certified then they wouldn't have such a severe shortage now.

Airlines have also laid off pilots during several industry downturns since 2001. Every time that happens, some switch careers and never return to flying.

Then add in the large amount of away-from-home time, non-trivial danger, and post 9/11 rules, and it's easy to see why a lot of folks are profoundly 'meh' about it.

Know a few former Naval Aviators who hit their 8-10 year commit and decided to get a Masters in something not aviation related -- work-life balance was a definite draw.

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