Article: Airlines face pilot-availability shortfall
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IN FOCUS: Airlines face pilot-availability shortfall
Worry about future pilot and engineer supply for airlines has been  around since the 1990s, but something has always happened to postpone  the predicted shortage.
 Industry experts today, however, look at the number of forward orders  for new aircraft, predictions of world fleet expansion, and sustained  growth in the Asia-Pacific region and cannot see a further postponement  unless the world economy moves from sluggish growth into depression -  and that is not, at present, being predicted. 
 The number of new pilots required to be trained in the next 20 years  is 450,000 worldwide, according to the Professional Aviation Board of  Certification (PABC). Simulation and training giant CAE estimates the  requirement at 20,000 new pilots a year, which is roughly the same as  PABC's prediction. 
 Meanwhile, Martin Eran-Tasker, technical director of the Association of 
Asia Pacific Airlines,  presenting at the Flightglobal Safety in Aviation - Asia conference in  Singapore in May, pointed out that the Asia-Pacific region alone had a  need to train 184,000 fully trained pilots and 250,000 aircraft  technicians in the next 20 years, with China's specific needs being,  respectively, 72,000 and 110,000.
 
   
  
 Cathay Pacific's director of flight operations has stressed the importance of performance-based navigation 
   Eran-Tasker says government figures show that the number of would-be  pilots presenting themselves for training, and the number of licences  being issued, are both going down because the appeal of *****piloting as a  career is plummeting.
 He ascribes this to industry instability, the high entry cost,  *****unsocial working patterns, and the fact that *****piloting is now less well  paid than some other professions.
 PABC's Asia manager, Capt John Bent, is trying hard to spread the  message that training is not only a numbers game. Bent, also among the  speakers at the Flightglobal Safety in Aviation - Asia conference,  insists that quality is also vital, but that this fact is not, at  present, being taken seriously. 
 He says airlines are implementing safety management systems (SMS) -  which represent a reactive system of risk management - but training -  the proactive way of lowering risk and ensuring reliable operations -  continues to be budgeted based on regulatory minimum standards. Many  airlines have moved "beyond compliance" in other fields, but not in  training. Bent says he struggles with the absence of logic in this  approach to risk management. 
 Meanwhile, most airlines are not making practical plans for the  provision of sufficient numbers of expert staff in the future, let alone  for assuring the necessary quality, and of concern is that the  third-party training industry does not have the capacity to produce the  pilot and engineer numbers required. On the other hand, the accelerating  worldwide consolidation in this highly fragmented industry might create  a more resilient training sector, one with greater capacity for  investment in future expansion. 
 The recent takeover by simulation and training giant CAE of the 
Oxford  Aviation Academy (OAA) group of flight training organisations and type  rating training organisations - itself a product of progressive  consolidation over the last few years - is an example of this. CAE has  been particularly strong in type and recurrent training and OAA in 
ab initio, so the two are complementary.
 As an exercise in examining whether the fears of expert staff  shortage are real or imaginary, Bent lists the milestones in the  industry's pilot supply situation since 1997. He explains why, for the  last 15 years, the airline industry has repeatedly been able to scoff at  the pilot shortage warnings.
 In 1997, the Air Transport Association warned of an impending pilot  shortage. In 2001, following 9/11, air travel slumped and large number  of experienced pilots were furloughed. The SARS epidemic and fuel crisis  reversed recovery in 2003 and 2004, and later the pilot retirement age  was increased to 65, extending the careers of the baby-boomer generation  of pilots who were about to retire.
 In 2007, US regional airlines started to run out of pilots, and  flying training organisations to run out of instructors. In 2008, the  global financial crisis led to "negative growth". 
 Now, a few years later, Bent's chronicle has started to show some underlying indicators that point the other way.
 In 2011, air travel growth resumed and heavy forward orders were  placed for all categories of aircrafts. And this year, growth continues  and the arrival of non-negotiable age 65 retirements for the post-war  baby-boomer generation has begun to make a difference.
 Moreover, military-trained pilots and engineers continue to reduce in  number as the air transport industry grows and the military *****sector  shrinks.
 At the Flightglobal conference, Bent joked that the airlines now  would push for a pilots' retirement age of 70, to delay the day of  reckoning - again. Maybe this is not so far from the truth. On the other  hand, although it might eventually happen, right now none of the  authorities - including the International Civil Aviation Organisation  (ICAO) - has even begun to consider the possibility of extending further  the operating life of commercial aviation pilots.
 Opening the conference, the director general of the Civil Aviation  Authority of Singapore, Yap On Heng, talked about aviation's rapid and  continuing expansion in the region, explaining the three reasons for  this. The first is the emergence of China and India as economic powers,  the second is the continuing liberalisation of air services throughout  the region, but the third - and underrated - influence is the  low-cost-carrier factor, which is still developing rapidly. 
 
   
  
 Dragonair is a recent convert to evidence-based training 
 
  Heng explains: "Low-cost carriers emerged in Asia in the early 2000s  to tap the growing appetite for travel, and opened up a brand new market  for regional travel. They have now become a force in the Asian aviation  industry. Take Singapore for instance: LCCs were non-existent there a  decade ago, but since their emergence they have grown to contribute 46%  of the passenger traffic between Singapore and ASEAN cities in 2011. 
 The rapid expansion of Asian low-cost carriers have a domino effect  on the aviation system - with their higher demand for aircraft, their  additional load on air navigation services, and their need for more  flight crews and aircraft maintenance engineers. Throughout Asia, new  airports are being built and existing ones expanded to cater to the LCC  boom."
 
MONEY TALKS
 At the other end of the scale, Heng notes, the region is generating  large numbers of high net-worth individuals, so business aviation is  likely to expand exponentially. Business jets need two pilots and a team  of mechanics, just like jumbo jets do.
 Bent's concern, along with the looming human resources shortage, is  training appropriateness and quality. Appropriateness because, as he  points out, since 1982 it has been recognised that pilot training needed  a radical update because the nature of the piloting job, the aviation  environment and the aircraft themselves has changed significantly.
 In 1982, ICAO set up a Pilot Licensing and *****Training Panel (PLTP)  that sat until 1986, but failed to convince the ICAO Air Navigation  Commission and the Council that change was necessary.
 Since that rejection of change by ICAO in 1986, there has been a far  greater revolution. There are significant changes in the flightdeck  environment, aircraft technology, and air navigation, but still no  training changes have been adopted by national regulators to reflect the  new ways of working. 
 
AVIONICS ADVANCES
 The changes in the job are massive: for instance, fly-by-wire and integrated avionics systems arrived with the 
Airbus A320 series in 1988, and were embraced by 
Boeing in its 
777  series a few years later; avionics advances made flight engineers  redundant even in the largest widebody airliners; satellite-based  navigation is now the norm even if it still requires conventional  back-up; and pilots have been expected to adopt performance-based  navigation (PBN) without any basic preparation for it, despite the fact  that modern air traffic management will increasingly rely upon precision  navigation techniques to process traffic safely in busy airspace. 
 Indeed, Cathay Pacific's director of flight operations Capt Richard  Hall has warned that the full and highly skilled use of PBN capability  will be essential to enable Asia-Pacific air navigation service  providers to cope safely and efficiently with the predicted explosive  regional traffic growth. He talks of "narrowing corridors" as airspace  becomes busier.
 Bent refers to "national regulatory requirements lagging behind this  fast-changing industry", to "legal lock-in to established practice", and  a perception that change is a risk in its own right.
 
 
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