New pilots paying to fly

Schiphol, Netherlands: When Austin Whitehead started his first job as a co-pilot with Ryanair this month, he had a little more than 250 hours of flight experience under his belt – and €92,000 in loans to repay for his training.
It might seem odd that eager young pilots have to go so deeply into debt – about $124,000 in Whitehead’s case – when new airlines are popping up like weeds and many are scrambling to find qualified flight crews.
But he and other would-be flyboys are being squeezed by two recent trends. One is the downsizing of many national militaries, where most pilots used to get their training at government expense. The other is a new business model at airlines for cutting as many costs as possible through outsourcing – including pilot training.
In the mid-1990s, about three-quarters of the pilots flying for the world’s major airlines were trained by the military, according to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. Today, however, that figure has fallen sharply, to about 40 percent.
To fill their remaining pilot needs, commercial airlines have traditionally recruited from among charter and cargo pilots. Many of the larger carriers – including Lufthansa, British Airways and Qantas – have also operated their own flight training schools, with their own rigorous selection processes. Those include aptitude tests in math and physics, as well as psychological and physical fitness exams.
As global air traffic continues its rapid expansion, airlines are facing a growing shortage of qualified cockpit crews at a time when they have fewer financial resources available to train them.
For younger, start-up airlines in particular, the costs of building qualified flight crews is substantial: With each new aircraft an airline adds to its fleet, it needs, on average, about 10 new pilots, industry executives said.
Hence the financial and logistical appeal to a growing number of airlines of using private flight training schools to recruit and train prospective pilots.
Instead of investing in their own training centers, instructors and multi-million dollar flight simulators, more and more air carriers are signing agreements with pilot training companies to provide a pool of qualified candidates for potential hire. Under this system, the school gets paid a fee by the airline, the airline gets a trained pilot and the costs – as well as the financial risks – are borne by the applicant.
Whitehead got his job at Ryanair through just such a program, gaining his certification to fly Boeing 737 jets at a training center just outside Amsterdam run by CAE, a provider of aviation training services and flight simulators for military and civilian aircraft, based in Montreal. Over the past three years, the airline, based in Dublin, has recruited more than 350 pilots trained by CAE.
CAE has similar deals with other carriers, including the low-cost Indian carrier IndiGo and AirAsia of Malaysia, and it trains more than 75,000 crew members every year at facilities in 19 countries, making it one of the world’s largest pilot training companies.
21/08/07 International Herald Tribune, France