Older retirement age unlikely to ease worldwide pilot shortage

After years of debate about the merits of older pilots flying commercial passenger planes, a controversial rule that kept pilots over age 60 out of the cockpits of U.S. jetliners was overturned last week.
Congress passed legislation, which was signed into law by President Bush on Friday, that raises the mandatory retirement age for pilots to 65.
But the rule change will do little to help with a worldwide pilot shortage.
“The expected pilot shortage is so significant that increasing the pilot age to 65 will only solve a small part of the problem,” according to the International Air Transport Association, the Geneva-based group that represents 242 of the world’s leading airlines. Those IATA carriers operate about 94 percent of scheduled international flights.
“There are 16,000 aircraft on order through 2020, and we need to train 17,000 new pilots a year to fly them,” Giovanni Bisignani, director general of IATA, told reporters last week at the association’s annual media briefings in Geneva.
That represents 3,000 to 3,500 more pilots per year than the current system worldwide has the capacity to train, according to IATA.
The most serious pilot shortages are in emerging markets, such as India, where the training capacity is very limited.
IATA has endorsed what’s known as the multicrew pilot licensing training program, or MPL. It is a new and controversial way to train commercial pilots that puts far more emphasis on time in jetliner simulators with other crew members than on hands-on experience flying solo in a small plane.
But during last week’s media briefings in Geneva, Juergen Haacker, director of operations for IATA and one of its aviation safety experts, expressed reservations about the multicrew pilot program. The jury is still out on MPL, he said.
The goal of the MPL program is to greatly reduce the time it takes to train someone with no experience flying an airplane — any kind of plane — to be qualified to sit in the right seat of a commercial jetliner in as little as 12 to 18 months.
The transport association has started what it calls the IATA Training and Qualification Initiative, with the goal of increasing the pool of pilot candidates and improving training standards. As part of the new initiative, IATA will have a database to track MPL cadets.
In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration has so far not indicated that it will adopt the MPL program anytime soon.
18/12/07 James Wallace/Seattle Post Intelligencer, US