If you were to travel back to this time in 2020 and ask anyone in business or private aviation what the future looked like for their industry, chances are the answer would have been bleak.
After all, we were in the early days of the COVID pandemic, and few people were traveling farther than the grocery store. The aviation industry was literally grounded.
Now, fast-forward to today and ask the same question. No doubt the answer would be the polar opposite. Thanks to the amazing resurgence of global air travel, instead of scraping fleets, today’s aircraft manufacturers can’t build new aircraft fast enough.
And the future looks even brighter. According to Boeing’s 2024 Commercial Market Outlook (CMO), commercial air traffic has returned to its best pre-pandemic levels and is projected to continue to grow at nearly five percent per year over the next twenty years.
In absolute numbers, that growth amounts to the need for some 44,000 new commercial aircraft.
Oh, yes, let’s not forget the equally noteworthy impact we’ve seen on business and private aviation. Sales of new and pre-owned turboprops and jets continue to rival the best pre-pandemic numbers.
But wait, there’s more. We haven’t even touched on the (almost too good to be believed) predictions people have for the growth of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) eVTOL aircraft.
“This is a challenging and inspiring era for aviation,” said Brad McMullen, Boeing senior vice president of Commercial Sales and Marketing. “The return to more typical traffic growth shows how resilient our industry is, even as we work through the ongoing supply chain, production constraints, and other global challenges.”
When you build it, who will fly it?
One of the “challenges” Mr. McMullen alluded to is the rapidly widening gap between the numbers of available pilots and maintainers and the actual head count that we’ll need.
Boeing’s CMO says that all these new-generation airplanes (just the commercial models) will require some 650,000 pilots and 690,000 technicians to keep the global fleets in the air.
Again, the CMO doesn’t include the pilots, technicians, and support personnel needed for the tens of thousands of private and business aircraft and AAM/eVTOLs predicted to enter the fleet in the next two decades.
So you ask, where will all the pilots and maintainers come from? Well, that’s one of those kinds of questions that everyone can ask, but very few are willing to face the answer – which is, nobody knows.
No matter how you slice it, adding 1.2-plus million highly-trained professionals to an industry already struggling to fill its ranks is a really big order. Sure, time was when a young person’s love of flying or airplanes was plenty good enough to keep the aviation talent pipeline flowing with new talent.
Alas, that’s not the case any longer. A 2023 study of U.S. teenagers done by online research provider, stastia showed that, “12 percent of male teens listed professional athlete as their preferred future job, followed by 11 percent who wanted to become an online content creator. Classic dream jobs like musician (six percent) and doctor or nurse (five percent) still made the top 5, albeit barely.
For females, the latter seems to be the most coveted future job, with 13 percent of teenage girls wanting to become a medical professional, while 11 percent put actress as their dream occupation.”
The sobering fact is that being a pilot, once a “dream” job, doesn’t even crack the top 10 list for most middle- and high-school kids today.
The reality is that it’s not that they wouldn’t want a high-paying career around airplanes; it’s much more a fact that the average young person’s experience with airplanes of any kind begins and ends sitting in seat 34B on a family vacation.
And flying coach isn’t going to get anyone interested in anything other than finding a career that makes enough money to buy their own jet.
The “A, B, Cs” of attracting young people to aviation.
Any educator will tell you that for the majority of young people today, their biggest career influencer (aside from YouTube) is going to be found in their immediate friends and family. That doesn’t mean they’ll pursue a career in those immediate employment areas, but it does mean that their future career will come from some type of industry that they’re familiar with.
That’s why experts agree that if we want to get kids to consider any aviation career, we have to start by providing them and their parents/guardians with information about all the career opportunities found in aviation as early in their education as possible.
With that goal in mind, all sectors of aviation need to prioritize creating relationships with teachers and counselors at their local schools. It’s no surprise that the typical teacher knows little—if anything—about the excellent job opportunities that the aviation industry offers today.
“A” is for AeroCareers.net
But aviation is a big industry with big opportunities and big stories to tell. It’s a huge challenge to break it all down into easily consumable bits that students, teachers, and parents can understand.
The Aircraft Electronics Association (AEA) is one organization that is taking the problem head-on by creating its AeroCareers.net career portal, which was featured in a recent issue of Avionics News magazine.
As AEA’s Director of Workforce Development, Nick Brown, stated in the story, “We’ve created an awareness tool to showcase all of the opportunities that are not only in the avionics career field but throughout aviation today. But it goes well beyond jobs; it’s been created to introduce educators, school career guidance counselors, students, and parents to all the opportunities aviation and aerospace have to offer.”
Brown said that targeting and informing middle and high school career counselors was one of the primary goals when the AEA and its group of industry contributors set out to build the AeroCareers.net website.
“It was developed by a team of industry insiders who understand there are many paths available to a successful aviation career,” explained Simpson Bennett, Marketing Director for 4AIR and member of the Workforce Development Committee, which developed the AeroCareers.net website. “Business owners, aircraft technicians, pilots, engineers, marketers, and manufacturers all contributed to the success of the first-of-its-kind effort.”
“Because of the variety of target visitors, the website was designed to fulfill four key pillars: Information, Education, Inspiration, and Direction,” he continued. “We felt they were essential to attract talented individuals to drive the industry forward in the future.”
One thing that sets AeroCareers.net apart from other ‘job sites’ is that it’s been created to provide a path from where a visitor is (not knowing much about aviation) to where they may well want to be (having a rewarding career in aviation or a related field).
“Exploring an unfamiliar industry can be difficult,” Bennett said. “But our website makes it easier with its “Get Started” section, which offers six areas of information to guide visitors and help them navigate through all that the site offers.”
“Our target audiences are middle school kids, their family members, and other influencers,” Brown said. “They think planes are cool, but what does that mean about making aviation a career? Studies show that by middle school, most kids are already thinking about their career choice, and some even younger.”
Of course, AEA’s AeroCareers website is just one of many tools that industry leaders are creating to help introduce the next generation of pilots, maintainers, schedulers, planners, and others to our industry.
In fact, there’s a very good chance that a school or organization is starting a similar effort in your community. Your first and best step is to ask around to learn about what opportunities are available. The second and much more important step is to quit talking about it and get involved.
While we can’t control the future, we can all work together to help ensure that the aviation industry as a whole is doing all it can to attract, train, and retain the talented professionals we need.
