Opinion: Aviation needs to do more with less to fix its post-COVID problems

I’m on my home from the 2023 Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference – the world’s largest gathering of training and simulation professionals – in Orlando, Florida.

This Qantas flight and I/ITSEC relate through the common themes of the chronic ongoing, global workforce shortage of aircrew (including technical and maintenance personnel), and an operational delay to my flight from Melbourne to Orlando.

Due to unscheduled maintenance five days ago, my outbound QF21 departed late. A ‘simple’ delay had multiple flowon effects. My connecting flight, Dallas to Orlando, needed to be re-organised to get me to my final destination. But, in speaking to the cabin manager, I realised that there were other implications. Ground delays still add to the Flight Duty Period of rostered personnel, including flight crew, cabin crew, and maintenance personnel.

Given the significant length of this flight, we were touch-and-go for a while, whereby further delays would have likely incurred a cancellation or postponement due to exceeding crew duty limits.

This symphony of dependencies reminded me of a recent conversation with an Allied Air Force training commander. This air force, like most Western air forces, is experiencing a significant pilot graduation shortfall year on year. The impact of this is serious – reduced capability and limited ability to project air power and defend sovereignty. Complex air platforms require qualified and current aircrew. But the bottleneck in the pilot training pipeline for this air force lies not in the recruitment phase, where there is a surplus of potential pilot candidates. Nor does it sit with qualified flying instructors – where there are fewer QFIs than planned, but sufficient to meet target graduation rates.

The shortfall is in life-support equipment fitters – the qualified maintainers and technicians that look after ejection seats, oxygen systems, and survival equipment.

This personnel shortage means fewer aircraft are available at any given time because survivability sub-systems are not able to be maintained at the same rate as required to train pilots.

As an industry, we tend to focus on the pilots that constitute the global pilot shortage. The US Air Force has been chronically understaffed by about 2,000 year-on-year. On the civil front, CAE, Airbus, and Boeing publish their annual pilot demand forecasts – illustrating that between 25,000 and 32,000 new commercial pilots are needed annually to feed both industry growth and replacements over the next decade at least.

Pilots are only part of the capability equation. Delivering outcomes in a complex training and operational system is a combined function of people, assets, and resources. Fifth-generation air forces and airlines need to optimise their use of any combination of their scarce people, assets, and resources to deliver incremental capability gains. Simply buying more complex and expensive platforms is not feasible, in terms of budgeting as well as speed to capability, nor does it scale efficiently. Extracting incremental gains by improving the efficiency of existing systems is critical.

Making a system more efficient is not easy, though. Investing in new platforms and weapons is often the visible and interesting part of the aerospace ecosystem, but a fifth-generation fighter is useless if it is supported by operating and training practices that are largely unchanged since their inception during the Second World War. Similarly, a composite modern airliner that can connect the globe is a liability if it is stagnant in a hangar awaiting personnel to service it.

Improving this symphony of operations, introducing small percentage gains in efficiency one at a time, adds up to yield force-multiplying advantages. For instance, simply shifting to one system that provides a common operating picture rather than siloed, disparate systems can help coordinate and improve operations.

A Middle Eastern air force has been able to generate an additional 10 advanced training sorties a week through the introduction of a decision support system that helps coordinate instructors, trainees, maintenance of aircraft, and duty periods, right down to augmenting decisionmaking for weather, parking bays, and refuelling operations.

I was looking forward to discovering

Extracting Incremental Gains By Improving The Efficiency Of Existing Systems Is Vital” “Extracting Incremental Gains By Improving The Efficiency Of Existing Systems Is Vital”

this at I/ITSEC – where the bottlenecks in these complex systems exist, and how we identify and unlock incremental gains and efficiency multipliers and introduce them into air transport and military operational and training systems. New training modes, technologies, decision support systems, simulators, best practices, and the art of the possible were all on display, with presenters and delegates sharing ideas, concepts, and new techniques.

While I/ITSEC is half a world away for us antipodean aerospace professionals, closer to home is the biennial human factors conference PACDEFF recently held in Sydney, the annual Asia-Pacific Airline Training Summit in Singapore, and industry associations such as the Royal Aeronautical Society and Aviation/Aerospace Australia which host regular knowledgesharing summits.

To bring it back to my opening quote from Al Pacino … we don’t need new quarterbacks or equipment to win just like we don’t need new aeroplanes or weapons to generate outcomes. We need to do more from less and get the most out of what we have, using innovative, sovereign capabilities – and those inches, and opportunities, are all around us. We have to keep our eyes open to identify them and use our initiative to convert them into gains.