To fulfill his dream of becoming a pilot, Mesut Yildirim traveled thousands of miles to attend Florida Tech’s flight school, and he is just one of many aspiring aviators coming to Brevard County from faraway places to pursue their love of flying.
Yildirim comes from Turkey, a country with an emerging aviation industry that is lacking a key component for future growth: Pilot training programs.
“Even if you have the money, it’s difficult to get flight training in Turkey, and most people who have the money want to get trained in the United States,” said Yildirim, one of 135 students enrolled in a Florida Tech scholarship program funded by Turkish Airlines.
Yildirim’s case is illustrative of a growing need for pilots in Asia and the Middle East, and flight training schools such as Florida Tech’s are positioning themselves to fill that shortage and make a greater name for themselves globally.
“We can’t solve the problem all by ourselves, but we can certainly capture the market,” said Kenneth Stackpoole, vice president of Florida Tech’s aviation program.
International airlines are willing to pay to recruit and train the pilots they need, and some — such as Turkish Airlines — offer aspiring pilots full scholarships coupled with generous compensation packages. Turkish Airlines pays entry-level pilots nearly $100,000 a year and offers some job candidates full tuition reimbursement.
The situation is different in the United States, where the entry-level airline pilots are typically paid poverty-level wages at regional airlines while they work their way up the ranks to captain jobs at the major airlines. In recent months, American regional airlines have said that they face a pilot shortage, too, due to federal laws which took effect this year. The laws impose stricter training requirements for entry-level pilots and increase the amount of mandatory rest time between flights.
Some regional airliners, like Republic Airways Holdings, have parked planes and canceled flights, telling their customers that they could not find a sufficient number of pilots to fly. But the Government Accountability Office released a report on Friday which called that assertion into question, arguing that the regional airlines’ hiring difficulties had more to do with low compensation than a scarcity of qualified candidates.
Some aviation experts say that American airlines will boost pay and increase hiring in response to market conditions, which are more favorable to the airline industry now than they were during the recession.
A growing demand
But the big growth, without question, is overseas.
A recent forecast by The Boeing Co. predicted Asian airlines would triple the size of their aircraft fleets within 20 years at a cost of $1.9 trillion. That translates to a need for 192,300 new pilots on that continent, according to Boeing.
Boeing predicts that many countries will encounter a similar problem soon — albeit, to a much smaller degree — as the current roster of pilots age and retire.
In the United States, for example, the General Aviation Manufacturers Association in Washington, D.C., says the average American airline pilot is 50 years old. Pilots must retire at age 65. The demographics of the pilot labor force are similar in Europe, which also requires airline pilots to retire at 65.
“If we were to pluck the average pilot out of a cockpit, they’d be within 15 years of retirement,” said Martin Rottler, a lecturer at Ohio State University’s Center for Aviation Studies. “That’s a serious issue.”
Rottler said that years of turmoil in the airline industry, coupled with low wages for entry-level pilots, had made it a highly unattractive profession for many who would otherwise have entered the industry in the past decade.
“The elephant in the room is pilot pay,” he said.
Wages not flying high
Pilots just out of aviation school can expect to be paid less than $30,000 per year if they take a job with an American regional airline. Some will be paid an annual salary as low as $18,000.
Though flight school graduates can work for significantly higher pay outside of the regional airline industry — as a personal jet pilot, for example — this steers them away from the career trajectory that leads to the most glamorous and lucrative jobs in aviation: the $200,000 salary jobs as top-tier pilots at the major airlines and cargo carriers. So new pilots face a financial dilemma: do they accept low salaries now with the expectation that they will be richly rewarded down the road, or do they accept higher-paying entry-level jobs with less growth potential?
The decision is especially difficult for those who have loans to pay, which is the situation of most American graduates of flight schools. Meanwhile, the price of fight licensing — which requires a minimum of 1,000 hours in a jet cockpit — is rising due to increasing costs, such as plane fuel expenses, and new, congressionally mandated safety training requirements. The total cost of pilot education can exceed $100,000.
A flight student at Florida Tech can expect to pay around $70,000 for training that results in an American commercial pilot license and $88,000 for a European license, plus housing and food costs. Flight students who want a bachelor’s degree along with their pilot’s license would pay Florida Tech $58,000 for flight training plus approximately $35,000 in annual tuition.
In good economic times, the track from a regional airline to a major airline could happen within two years.
But the last decade was a difficult one for the aviation industry, which was negatively impacted both by a steep recession and by a contraction in demand following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. There were few opportunities for advancement.
Dennis Brandt, a 2002 Florida Tech graduate of the university’s College of Aeronautics, said that he felt stymied by the lack of upward mobility in the aviation industry. Brandt said that jobs for pilots were so scarce when he graduated that he had to spend four years working as a flight instructor and earning a master’s degree before regional airlines would even consider hiring him.
When Brandt finally got a regional pilot job, he was paid so little that he could barely afford to feed himself.
“It’s impossible to support a family on that amount of money,” said Brandt, noting many of his colleagues gave up on flying, because of the low wages paid by regional airlines.
Six months ago Brandt made the leap from the regional airlines to the major airlines when he took a pilot job at United Airlines, and he is thrilled that his struggle paid off.
Brandt says that the future looks brighter for aspiring pilots today than it did when he was starting out.
Competing outlooks
Another Florida Tech alumnus, Zach Grant, agreed with Brandt’s asssessment of the pilot job market.
“The number of pilots being trained now is a small fraction of the number of pilots being trained in the 1990s, and we need more people now than we did then,” said Grant, a flight officer at United Airlines. “We at United, just to keep abreast of attrition, will have to start hiring 500-to-600 pilots per year for the foreseeable future."
But some aren’t as rosy-eyed about the employment prospects of pilots.
Patrick Smith, a pilot and author who runs a popular website called AskthePilot.
com, said he is dubious of the proposition that conditions will improve for Americans starting out in his profession.
“It’s somewhat telling that virtually no regional carriers have raised their salaries or benefit packages to levels that would appear aimed at retaining or attracting pilots,” Smith says on his website. “There will always be pilots — some would say too many of them — happy to endure almost anything for the sheer thrill of the job.”
Experts on automated technology, like drones, are even more pessimistic about the American labor market for pilots, with some saying that technology will reduce the number of pilots needed to operate passenger aircraft. That is the opinion of Mary “Missy” Cummings, a world-renowned researcher on drones who serves as director of Duke University’s Humans and Autonomy Lab.
“There are formal efforts both in the U.S. and abroad to determine how to go from two pilots to one in commercial aircraft,” said Cummings, a former fighter pilot.
But Boeing forecasters predict that the North American airline industry will grow in the near future due to “burgeoning demand” and that it will add 85,700 pilot jobs over the next 20 years.
Capitalizing on a need
With its temperate weather, Florida boasts dozens of flight schools. Florida Tech and a few others stand out, however, because they offer dual-degree programs with flight options. That allows students to not only get pilot training but also to develop expertise on the business of aviation, something key for foreign airlines that need both pilots and knowledgeable administrators.
That’s why Turkish Airlines is footing the entire bill for Yildirim’s education in exchange for the promise that he will work for them for 10 years.
To capitalize on the international demand for pilots, Florida Tech is forming partnerships with foreign flight training academies, so that students get the certifications necessary to fly commercial planes outside the United States. The university announced this month that it will begin collaborating with four European flight academies, and university leaders said that they expect to add Asian flight academies to their list of partners in the near future.
For the past few years, the number of applicants to Florida Tech’s flight training program has increased 8 percent to 10 percent per year, according to Greg Reverdiau, the university’s director of business operations for aviation programs.
“It puts Melbourne, Fla., on the map,” he said. “We have the airspace to fly almost every day of the year.”
Story and photo: http://www.floridatoday.com
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