Airlines Find Hiring Pilots Increasingly Difficult

Globally, airlines have ordered hundreds of new planes, the number of air connections is growing, but shortages of people able to work on them are starting to appear in Poland.
The Polish low-cost carrier Centralwings is planning to employ 120 pilots by the year 2010. Lufthansa is looking for 360 people, while Ireland’s Ryanair will need 1,500 of them in the next five years. It is better not to mention the staff requirements of Asian airlines. It looks like there will not be enough people to pilot their planes.
In such a situation, airlines are left with no other choice but train their pilots.
“Our pilots fly in Norway, Ireland, Canada, India, the RSA, Vietnam and Singapore,” said Mieczyslaw Gorak, director of an air transport centre at Rzeszow Technical University, which produces 15 graduate pilots each year.
There are around fifty air training centres in Poland. The problem is that you cannot get a licence to fly a large plane at them. Airlines are now fiercely competing for pilots. They are losing their pilots, because they are outbid by foreign rivals.
Polish carriers usually lose the battle for skilled professionals, because they are unable to pay them well. In Poland, pilots flying in Poland only get ZL4,000-6,000 net monthly. The ones flying on trans-Atlantic routes have the chance to get ZL20,000. Meanwhile, Ryanair is paying its pilots around EUR6,000 net. The offers from India are even more lucrative.
24/04/07 Polish News Bulletin/Epicos.com (press release), Switzerland