The human factor: inside the aviation talent crisis

In 2021, the NSW government estimated the Australian aviation sector would need 11,000 pilots alone by 2038, to say nothing of cabin and ground staff, with demand for Australian-trained pilots tipped to grow. Over the next 20 years, it’s estimated 260,000 pilots will be needed to keep the aviation sector going across the Asia-Pacific region as a whole.

According to coach and industry advocate Kirsty Ferguson of Pinstripe Solutions, the talent crisis is “very real”, with plenty of airlines the world over begging for new staff.

“It’s a really good time to be a pilot at the moment, and cabin crew, apart from all the other roles,” she says.

“Just about every airline’s recruiting. I was just having a quick look, and in GA for pilot roles, there were 45 to 50 jobs available, for jet and turboprop jobs around 35 open now, and cabin crew around 25 that I could see.

“They’re all open, because they’re all looking for the same group of people, the same levels of experience coming through.”

 Losing the magic of flight

How did we reach this point? According to Ferguson, one unanticipated impact of the pandemic on aviation was the “deglamourisation” of the sector, as many workers who thought they had solid jobs were laid off or stood down during lockdowns.

In 2021, 2,500 domestic and 6,000 international employees from Qantas and Jetstar alone were furloughed for several months during border closures, despite the Morrison government’s airline relief package. About 10,000 staff and 6,000 contractors from Virgin Australia were impacted by the airline going into administration a year earlier.

“It’s not the secure career that a lot of aviators and aviation staff considered. They all had to go and get side hustles or go and do totally different roles during the pandemic, so I think some of that glamourisation of it and the security of being an awesome career path has slipped away,” says Ferguson.

“We’ve already had a lot of people exit the industry – I was surprised that those people who exited were as young as 30 going, ‘I’m not going to stick around and wait for the recovery. I can’t stay current. How do I stay current when I can’t even get into a flying role?’”

Not only that, she says, but a lot of the ‘brains trust’ at the top of aviation – veteran pilots who could have trained newer ones and helped keep them current – has left. As it takes new pilots two to three years to earn their bachelor of aviation – never mind the 1,500 flight hours needed for a Commercial Pilot’s Licence – the need for training is acute, especially since many existing pilots may have let their coverage lapse during the height of the pandemic.

“We’ve got aviators who are uncovered and have been uncovered for four years because of redundancy. We’ve got to get them back into the industry should they wish to come back in, but it costs money to become current again,” says Ferguson.

She adds all of this is not a new phenomenon post-pandemic – there were already warning signs beforehand, which have only been exacerbated by COVID-19.

“We’ve got all of these issues pre-pandemic, around training and retirements and all of that, that we were talking about then, and now we have got the new issues post-pandemic, that have slowed down any planning that was in place,” she says.

Overseas airlines, too, have been poaching Australian staff – Emirates recently kicked off a big recruitment drive for Aussie cabin crews, while as Australian Aviation’s Hannah Dowling found out last year, American carriers are dangling big incentives in front of Aussie pilots to go and work on the other side of the Pacific.

The E-3 visa scheme can be accessed by Australian professionals with qualifications in some “specialty occupations”, such as airline pilots, and is renewable indefinitely for two year terms. The scheme is being used especially by regional US carriers to entice Aussie pilots into a jobs market voracious for new talent. I was estimated last year that, while the US is capable of training up 7,000 new pilots annually, 13,000 would be needed around the country in the past 12 months alone.

“We’ve had a lot of talent go over to America, because they ramped up more quickly than we did. Understandably, they’re offering great bonuses, and they’re now offering amazing things like possible green cards and pathways to mainline carriers, not just regional,” says Ferguson.

“There’s all of these issues that have exacerbated a talent shortage around flight crew and cabin crew, and obviously, hires into other areas of aviation were impacted during the pandemic as well.”

Disruption and chaos

When you have a shortage of staff, it naturally follows that you have a shortage of planes in the air – which, especially during periods of high demand, means delays and cancellations will skyrocket.

June 2022 was infamously the worst month on record for plane delays in Australia, breaking the record that had been set just two months before over the Easter break, with low staff supply and high school holiday demand, plus the impact of the NSW floods, colliding to produce images of shocking queues stretching out of the building at major airports like Sydney and Melbourne.

Data released by the Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics (BITRE) showed just 63.0 per cent of all flights arrived on time that month, while 61.9 per cent departed on schedule. Flight cancellations hit nearly three times the long-term average at a total of 5.8 per cent.

As bad as things can get in the cities, however, spare a thought for the country: one particularly hard-hit area is regional aviation, which is something that groups like the Regional Aviation Association of Australia (RAAA) have been sounding the alarm about for some time.

In a report from the US Regional Airlines Association on regional pilot shortages cited by the RAAA, it was found that 324 regional American airports have lost a third of their service on average, with more than 50 losing over half of their air service and 14 losing air service entirely.

“This is just around the corner for us here in Australia, which is being exacerbated by a critical shortage in aircraft maintenance engineers,” said RAAA CEO Steven Campbell in March this year.

Last October, RAAA released a paper of its own on the problem of aviation engineering shortages, arguing that Australia needs a “national aviation academy” to eliminate interstate training disparities and calling on CASA to speed up migration by better recognising international licences.

“All aviation sectors are affected by this shortage on a daily basis; we just need to look at increasing flight delays and flight cancellations,” said Campbell at the time.

“Our regional areas are particularly affected, remote communities and businesses could lose access to basic air services, which are vital for connectivity, medical and mail services.”

Even larger players like Rex are feeling the squeeze. In April, the airline cut back on nine regional routes across Victoria, NSW, South Australia and Queensland and changed scheduling on four others, with one route (Mildura to Adelaide) suspended entirely.

At the time, Rex’s general manager of network strategy, Warrick Lodge, made no bones about the cause: “These adjustments are necessitated by the chronic shortage of airline professionals, particularly pilots and engineers, as well as the severe disruption in the supply chain of aircraft and engine parts,” he said.

The knock-on effect from this was not insignificant: it ended up causing Australia’s third largest airline group to forecast a $35 million operational loss for the 2022–23 financial year.

Rex told the ASX: “The global shortage of pilots and engineers, along with supply chain shocks post-COVID, have disrupted Rex’s network, forcing Rex to make significant reductions to its flight schedules over the last couple of months to match the need for aircraft, pilots and engineers to what is available.”

It’s a problem Raymond Toutounji has also seen first-hand on his visits to the regions. Toutounji, head of marketing for Sydney Flight College, often finds himself on roadshows to regional NSW as part of SFC’s Connections program promoting aviation careers to high school students and says that a flight cancellation in a major metro area is a very different beast to one in a regional city or town.

“It doesn’t sound like much, you know, OK, flight’s been cancelled,” he says. “But for them, that flight in itself is not your $39 flight from Sydney to Brisbane, it’s a four- or five-hundred-dollar flight,” he says.

“It means you’ve got to catch the one 24 hours later, or it means you hire a car and it’s going to take you 12 hours to drive there. So, the options when a flight is cancelled are not like we have here in the cities.”

Long runway to recovery

Unfortunately, while many airlines are doing all they can to address the crisis, it’s not a problem that will be solved overnight, says Ferguson.

“A lot of people were talking about like a two-year ramp-up. No. Right from the start, I said it’s going to take more than two years to recover from this downturn – we’re looking at four years, and the four-year mark is going to be next year,” she says.

“So, I think we’re well on the way, but there’s a lot more work to do to make sure that we are managing the pre- and post-pandemic talent issues.”

One airline that says it hasn’t experienced the same degree of difficulty with its talent pool is Bonza. According to its CEO Tim Jordan, while talent is “relatively scarce”, the new low-cost carrier has not had any trouble attracting staff, especially to its first base on the Sunshine Coast.

“We have some new, really quite unique, benefits available, and I think that’s really helping us,” he says.

“If you have your home here on the Sunshine Coast, and you’re able to fly brand-new equipment, state of the art equipment, potentially within 15 minutes from where you live on the beach, that has a certain amount of appeal, especially as you can get home every night to your place, whether it’s on the beach or in the hinterland.

“That’s a really strong proposition, so that’s really helped us, and there are certainly lifestyle benefits.”

This flexibility extends to Bonza’s support staff as well, with team members also located in places like Western Australia and Tasmania alongside the states in which the airline already operates.

“That is a quite a unique offering, which means we can actually appeal to people maybe who have relocated to a place they’d like to be with, or located in with their families, and we can still capitalise on their wonderful experience and talent,” says Jordan.

“What it allows us to do is probably have a talent pool of people and experience that we otherwise wouldn’t if we were insistent in terms of them moving, especially as a startup carrier in the market.”

On the training side, Toutounji points to the Sydney Flight College’s work through its Connections program as one way to entice a new generation into taking to the skies.

“The common denominator here is that the students currently are not linking what they’re doing at school, to what it takes to be a pilot, the perception is, you’ve got to be this real, you know, super clever and super smart, and you need to do physics. It’s a broken misconception,” he says.

“That education piece, I think, is really crucial. People come out going, ‘OK, I could be a pilot, I could go into air traffic control, I could be a mechanical engineer, it is a possibility for me, based on the skills I have. I don’t need to spend three years at uni, I don’t need to do four-unit maths.’”

The major players aren’t standing idle, either. In May, Qantas announced a massive new flight training centre in Sydney, which it says will train up to 4,500 Qantas and Jetstar pilots and cabin crew per year including for its A350 Project Sunrise flights to New York and London.

Slated for completion in early 2024, the facility in St Peters near Sydney Airport will include up to eight full-motion simulators, as well as classrooms, cabin mock-ups with emergency equipment, and flight training devices. This, plus a major recruitment drive at Jetstar, is part of Qantas Group’s ambition to create 8500 new operational roles over the next 10 years.

Ferguson agrees that a key part of the recovery will be attracting new blood and persuading people that they can still make a career out of aviation.

“We have to get back to the grassroots, we have to go, ‘alright, have you thought about this as a career?’ Yes, we’ve had a big glitch in what we were offering as an industry and what we were available to do security wise, but every industry has those,” she says.

“I’ve worked across a multitude of industries, so I know that most industries go through some sort of downturn, and in my time in aviation, we’ve had about four, we always recover, and we always come back bigger and better.”