Kyle Buffelli faces one of a pilot’s most-feared scenarios: an engine fire. As animated smoke billows, a computerized instructor calmly guides Buffelli through a checklist, displayed in his virtual reality headset, that starts with cutting off the fuel in his simulated small plane.
The immersive training device, made by Prescott, Arizona-based True Course Simulations, is designed to teach students the basics of flight procedures so they’ll feel comfortable when they climb into a real plane.
“After about four or five missions, the students are basically saying, ‘OK, I don’t need you anymore’ to the instructor, so the instructor can focus on students who are having a specific problem with a specific procedure,” Ray Bédard, founder of TCS, tells Forbes.
That’s a potentially tantalizing prospect for an industry where flight instructors are in short supply, as major airlines hire as many pilots as they can to deal with a debilitating shortage.
After slashing headcount during the worst of the pandemic, partly by paying some staff to retire early, North American airlines are short about 17,000 pilots this year, according to consulting firm Oliver Wyman.
Airlines have compensated by cutting flights to smaller cities, mostly those flown by regional carriers, which have lost hundreds of pilots to the major airlines. There were 324 U.S. airports with less service in January than in the same month in 2020, 76% of the total. About a dozen small airports, including Williamsport, Pennsylvania, have lost service entirely.
The major U.S. airlines brought on a record 13,128 pilots last year, according to the consultancy Future & Active Pilot Advisors. The previous high was 5,426 in 2021. But it’s not enough, with a wave of Boomers heading into retirement and older members of Generation X not far behind. Almost half of U.S. airline pilots are 50 or older, with a mandatory retirement age of 65.
Oliver Wyman projects that the gap between demand and supply will grow to 24,000 pilots in 2026.
One proposed remedy — to relax the requirement that pilots gain 1,500 hours of flying time to qualify to work for a scheduled airline — lacks political support. “There’s no short-term fix for creating pilots,” says Ken Byrnes, head of the flight training program at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s main campus in Daytona Beach, Florida.
There are developments, however, that could help narrow the gap, including new training technologies that promise to improve proficiency and reduce dropout rates; efforts to improve financing for students; and more rigorous student screening procedures, which would ensure marginal candidates aren’t taking up finite training resources.
Expanding training capacity. One of the roots of the pilot shortage is a sharp drop in training and hiring after 9/11 reduced demand. There are about 1,600 private flight schools in the U.S. today, down from roughly 2,400 before 9/11, says Bob Rockmaker, head of the Flight Schools Association of North America (FSANA).
But as travel demand has returned with the pandemic waning, many schools have been expanding, and sharply higher salaries have boosted interest in the career. As of year-end, there were a total of 280,582 student pilot certificates, which don’t expire, in issuance, up by almost 60,000 from 2020.
Over the last two years, ATP, the largest private flight-school chain in the U.S., has increased enrollment by almost 50% to 2,500 students, and opened 28 new locations, giving it over 80. New Jersey’s Infinity Flight Group, one of the largest flight schools in the Northeast, expects to double enrollment to 500 over the next 12 to 18 months.
University flight programs have been growing too, says Byrnes. Embry-Riddle’s Daytona Beach flight program has 1,400 students using 103 planes, up from 800 students and 52 trainers a decade ago. Enrollment in the flight program at the school’s campus in Prescott, Arizona has almost doubled in the last eight years, to 857.
Amid a spike in applications, the University of Oklahoma last year unveiled a $30 million plan to expand its flight program from 250 students to 600.
Airlines have been taking a more direct role in training new pilots. Last month, United graduated the first class of 51 cadet pilots from its Aviate Academy in Goodyear, Arizona, the first flight school in the U.S. owned by a major airline. In Denver, United is building a $100 million training center with 12 full flight simulators. It plans to onboard roughly 10,000 new pilots by the end of 2030. The airline has 12,000 pilots now. Delta said last month it was establishing a flight school in Florida that will be run by U.K.-based Skyborne. Other airlines have partnered with flight schools, including Southwest, JetBlue, Frontier and American Airlines.
But limiting growth are shortages of planes and of certified flight instructors. Instructing has been the main way that aspiring airline pilots have built up the 1,500 flying hours required by the FAA, but booming charter and fractional jet ownership companies like NetJets, which have lower hour requirements, have been hiring them away.
New types of training aircraft. Order books are flush at the biggest makers of small trainers, Piper Aircraft and Textron’s
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The FAA could increase the number of aircraft suitable for training if it completes long-considered rule changes for cheaper light sport aircraft that would increase their allowable maximum gross weight of 1,320 pounds. That currently makes them marginal as trainers because carrying two passengers leaves little room for fuel.
Given their lower weight, the planes aren’t built to take as much of a pounding, John says, and they don’t have much appeal to larger flight schools. But smaller flight schools with tighter budgets are more interested, he says. That might relieve demand for traditional trainers, benefiting larger schools.
New technology. Adoption of virtual reality training tools by private flight schools will be limited until the FAA says the time spent using them can count toward the minimum number of flight hours required.
But they’re starting to catch on at universities and high schools. After Embry-Riddle’s flight training enrollment at its Daytona campus hit capacity at 1,200 two years ago, it was able to add another 200 students by using VR. A four-week introductory course based on multiple virtual reality systems allows students to learn before they ever sit in a real cockpit. They practice pre-flight checks on a virtual Cessna 172, master the arcane language of communicating with air traffic control with an AI tool that corrects them, and acquire the basics of flying in True Course Simulations’ interactive VR flight simulator.
Students are taking on average 22% less time to advance to their first solo flight, Byrnes says.
A single unit of TCS’ VR flight simulator costs $39,000, and training on the devices results in needing about five hours less of expensive flight time on a real plane with an instructor, according to TCS’ Bédard, who started developing the technology when he was a professor at Embry-Riddle.
The company’s simulators are also being used at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Bédard says it’s allowed introductory training for the piston-engine Cirrus SR20 and T-6 jet trainer to be conducted with a reduced ratio of one instructor to eight students.
Better financial support. At private flight schools, the dropout rate runs as high as 80%. One of the main reasons: students run out of money. A commercial pilot training course can cost as much as $100,000 and the vast majority of flight schools aren’t eligible for federal student aid. Many aspiring pilots from low-income backgrounds don’t have the credit scores to get private loans.
To tap into federal aid, the flight school association, FSANA, set up a body to develop accreditation standards for flight schools. While aircraft rental fees aren’t currently a covered expense, FSANA’s Rockmaker thinks federal student loans or grants could cover $35,000 to $50,000.
Some are calling for Congress to pick up some of the tab with grant funding. Senators Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) and John Hoeven (R-North Dakota) last month introduced a bill that would pay for military veterans to be trained to become commercial pilots.
Airlines have started to subsidize training. Delta is offering up to $20,000 in scholarships for students at its forthcoming pilot academy, and will also cover the cost of interest from certain lenders. American Airlines is offering low-interest loans in partnership with its employee credit union.
In the 1960s and ’70s, some U.S. airlines covered the full cost of training, and Lee Woodward, CEO of Skyborne, thinks that practice is likely to return.
“My guess is before the year is out, we will see one or two of the bigger airlines in the U.S. fully sponsoring again,” he says.
Relax standards in ways that won’t impact quality. Delta and FedEx were the last major companies that stipulated that pilots must have college degrees. Last year, they dropped the requirement. Southwest Airlines said in February it would hire pilots with 500 hours of experience flying turbine-powered planes, down from 1,000 hours.
Some background-check black marks, like a speeding ticket, may no longer disqualify a candidate. Airlines are being more understanding about training setbacks, like failing to win a rating to fly by instruments or pass the private pilot’s license exam on the first try, says Tyler Tenbrink, head of training at Piedmont Airlines, a regional carrier owned by American Airlines. “Those things may have been detrimental five years ago, but they are no longer,” he tells Forbes.
More selectivity. In Europe, flight-school applicants go through a rigorous selection process before admission. That’s resulted in washout rates of just 2% to 3%, says Woodward. In the U.S., the norm is that a willing customer with money gets to fly. Given the current high demand and limited resources in the U.S., Skyborne has sought to bring initial screening over to this side of the pond.
Its first attempt was rocky. After acquiring its Florida school in 2021 from FlightSafety International, Skyborne found that the selection process scared potential students away. It backtracked to running the process for students after they’d attained their private pilot licenses and were looking to qualify for pathway programs with partner airlines. But the school it’s setting up with Delta will run a rigorous European-style selection process.
“If there’s a fixed supply of certified flight instructors in the U.S. and we’re wasting them with candidates that are never going to make it through the program or don’t have the capability or aptitude, then we’re using that resource in a very inefficient manner,” says Ed Davidson, managing director of Skyborne’s Florida school.