Of course there isn’t truly a “pilot shortage” any more than there is a “gold shortage,” but employers offering the same salaries as in 2007, adjusted for the official inflation rate, will find that not enough qualified people apply. Airlines all over the world are hiring and, with some bureaucratic finesse, can fill a job in a foreign country with a U.S. citizen. I recently spoke with the manager of a small air carrier. He recently raised charter prices by more than 10 percent. I asked if he’d done that because demand was so strong. “No,” he responded. “It is because I had to give all of the pilots a 30-percent raise a few months ago and our costs are now higher.” (The raise was necessary to prevent pilots from jumping “ship” to the big airlines.)
At least until autonomous aircraft are certified for carrying passengers, I wonder if we’ll go through a period where Americans have less mobility (automobile traffic jams getting worse every year (also see this multi-city report) plus higher airfares). This ICAO report says that the crew (“pilot wages and benefits”) costs $489 per block hour out of a total of $2,550. So airline ticket prices might go up at roughly 1/5th the rate of pilot wage increases? [Note that this report puts flight attendants, part of the “crew” as far as the FAA is concerned, into a separate bucket of “passenger service”]
Readers: Are we going into a period of less mobility? If so, is it time to invest more in video conferencing software and hardware?
Related:
- “Unions and Airlines”
- Tyler Cowen asks if we can do big projects (Americans moving less)
- those higher pilot salaries might lead to some additional family court litigation in Massachusetts: “I remember one enterprising young lady who worked as a waitress at Boston’s Logan airport. She targeted three airline pilots, had a child by each of them, and back then was collecting $25,000 in tax-free child support from each pilot…” (that was in the 1980s; today it would be $40,000+/year minimum per child)
Americans need to be dragged kicking and screaming out of their cars. It is a development pattern with no future and is producing colossal waste and inefficiency.
Americans won’t be driving nearly as much in coming years because circumstances will force that outcome. The energy and capital/maintenance intensive driving infrastructure won’t be available. The question is how much time and money do we waste before preparing properly for the inevitable.
bobob….,
We can’t change this paradigm on a dime (sorry). Ride-sharing will probably save the auto-centric lifestyle for the next generation.
There are going to be serious problems in the next ten years. We don’t have a generation. You already see this developing now with huge mileage counts of road returning to gravel from asphalt because the maintenance costs cannot be met. You see this now with the emerging massive swell of sub-prime auto loan defaults: Average Americans cannot afford new cars anymore.
The motoring society is going to crumble now. Not decades from now.
I don’t particularly care what happens with regard to aviation. That’s frivolity and waste.
#3 It is so called “gravel”, basically a more efficient way to apshalt roads, not real gravel. Feels better than regular asphalt after few weeks worth of traffic. Requires less maintenance and being pushed by presently unnecessary roads that were in good state and in some case repaired recently, by smaller municiaplaities, with they eye to reduce road maintenance in the future.
On a different note, here is a proposal that should be liked by both socialist left and right:
Unless Massachusets shows the way and prohibits car ownership or makes is very hard we are going nowhere and are stack with all those pesky AmeriKans driving at free will whenever they want, parties or work or buying properties outside of progressive cities out of reach of progressive ‘technocrat’ rule. Stop hypocrisy, half measures such as state registration and small yealry fees are not working. At this very moment new hordes of gleaming 2018 vehicles arriving to dealrships in our backyards! Do not rely on google cars drivng prols to approved destinations, it can be reprogrammed by libertarian corwd! As it is stands now, everyone can walk in and buy or even rent a car and commit DUIs or even worse drive to a red state! Prohibit car ownership!
The transportation planners are well into their generation-spanning project to immobilize everyone by making automobiling expensive/impractical, so yes.