Aviation
No fuel, no pilots
David Wragg
One consolation for airline managements currently 'grappling with the problems of restrictions on fuel supplies, which in the United States at least were becoming obvious even before the last Arab-Israeli war; must be that the higher loadings on their reduced services will at least make them more profitable: Another advantage is that the reduced services will be staving off a potentially em
barrassing problem for the airlines, that of an increasing shortage of airline pilots. Rather than hunting for aircrew, Trans World Airlines, for example, are laying off 500 flight deck and cabin crew as the result of cutting the number of flights by a twelfth.
The principal of one of Britain's three commercial pilot training schools estimated earlier this year that the annual pilot intake of Britain's airlines would soon have to be increased by at least 50 per cent. Some of the extra pilots could come from the Armed Forces, although this is a much diminished source of supply and would in any case leave the schools to provide some 400 new pilots a year, against 250 at present.
A major factor in the pending shortage of airline pilots must be the rump of ex-wartime aircrew who will be reaching retirement age during the next few years. In 1977, British Caledonian, Europe's largest independent airline, expects to lose 15 per cent of its pilots, while the former BEA Division of British Airways expects to retire five per cent of its pilots, plus wastage which currently runs at twice the level of the independent airlines, partly because the independents often poach aircrew from British Airways, and partly because some of the pilots concerned become ' sickened with the illogical militancy of BEA and BOAC aircrew and groundstaff. Promotion is usually faster with an independent airline than with the state corporations. Naturally, air traffic growth will play some part in increasing the demand for pilots, depending on the extent to which larger aircraft can be utilised. There must be some cause for relief in the fact that, had not aircraft sizes and speeds increased as' they have done during the last two decades, today's traffic would require some 20,000 pilots to work for British airlines alone, instead of the 8,000 or so actually needed today. The main reason for fears of a shortage, and the reason for airline embarrassment on this question, is that it is largely due to the reluctance of airline managements to heed the warnings of the training schools and their own senior management pilots. The time taken to train a pilot can be as little as a year, but more often it takes eighteeen months. Thus, student pilots who started their training this autumn will not qualify as commercial pilots until the summer of 1975, and then it will take another year of training and conversion flying before they can help to fly an aeroplane. On such a basis, the 1977 pilots will have to enter the schools next year, and the signs are that the airlines will leave everything to the last minute before expecting the schools to mount what might literally be a crash programme of training. The schools might cope, but at the expense of breaking valuable long-term contracts with foreign airlines, who have been increasing their intake of pilots gradually to meet the increased demand of the next few years. It would be surprising if the schools did not also find themselves with problems, as instructors could be wooed away to fly with the airlines, attracted by promises of higher salaries. • Cost is crucial to the whole argument. The student pilot, unlike the student at university or art school, cannot expect a grant towards the £6,500 cost of his eighteen month training. His family or his prospective employer must pay the bill. British Airways sponsor suitable candidates, as does British Caledonian, and Court Line has certainly been known to do so, but too many airlines seem to feel that the £4,500 which still has to be spent on training the new pilot when he reaches the airline is enough. Other airlines manage by attracting staff from those which do sponsor students'. One of the worst features of this is the costly high pilot turnover of some local service airlines, which are used by young pilots and by other airlines as a means of providing experience for new pilots. In one respect, the shortage takes on a sinister note with some airlines quietly pressing the Civil Aviation Authority to adopt the American system of examining student pilots, which allows the student to be aided by his examiner as if he were a part of a two-man crew, rather than being expected to fly the aircraft himself. As the Papa India Trident • disaster showed clearly, even the best regulated airline can be caught out by a sudden illness on the flight deck, and it is essential that pilots should be able to handle an aircraft on their own for as long as it takes to land safely.
Many airlines, including British Airways, make life difficult for themselves by using three pilots on three-crew aircraft, instead of following the RAF practice of having two pilots and a specialised flight engineer. While the three-man crew gets the new pilot working more quickly, it also increases the demand for pilots and many maintain that a young and inexperienced pilot is not the best man to look after increasingly complex flight , systems.
Nothing could be more ironic, should the fuel supply problems ease significantly in the near future, than that the airlines should be faced with another crisis, but this time of their own making. Even if they eventually solve the pilot shortage, possibly by using larger aircraft, •there will then be the problem of attracting enough cabin staff.
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