How Our Daughters Can Solve The Pilot Shortage

By Geoff Murray, a partner in Oliver Wyman’s aviation practice and a male ally

In the United States, the median annual salary of a flight attendant is around $56,000 while for airline pilots it’s around $140,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Yet, the Federal Aviation Administration reports that almost eight out of 10 flight attendants are women, while only 6.6 percent of pilots are female. As a former commercial airline pilot, I find the statistics baffling.

But my daughter can do the math and elected to pursue a career as a pilot. When she was selecting a college, she picked one that offered a degree in aviation. Her choice was not based on an unquenchable thirst for open sky and adventure, but rather an attraction to a profession that paid well and is suffering from a significant and long-term shortage of talent. This insufficient supply of pilots is expected to only worsen over the decade as baby-boom retirements increase, and many airlines are beginning to actively recruit women to help fill the gap.

Like her Generation Z cohort — the older members of which have already survived two recessions in their short lives — my daughter was looking for the kind of job and economic security she thought she’d have as a pilot, a profession with gender-blind pay and seniority-based advancement. She also loved the free travel and the flexibility of pilot schedules.

Boys’ club

So why don’t other young women make that choice? As my daughter and other female pilots and prospective pilots would tell you, it’s not always so easy to break into a male-dominated profession. Being a woman pilot can mean not having other women on the job for support or as mentors. When I flew commercially out of O’Hare, the other pilots I flew with were predominantly men, and at times it could be a boys’ club.

This makes recruiting women a difficult job for airlines. In Oliver Wyman’s 2020 Flight Operations survey of senior aviation management, 83 percent reported finding it moderately to extremely challenging to recruit and retain female pilots.

Today, I stay active as a flight instructor, and while the number of female student pilots is increasing all the time, it isn’t moving up fast enough. The number of female commercial pilots has only inched up over the years. Worldwide just over five percent of pilots are women, according to the International Society of Women Airline Pilots. In India, the nation with the highest proportion of women pilots, it’s 12.4 percent.

To change that, the survey concluded that airlines would have to reach out to women earlier, when they were still in high school, before stereotypes about the profession had formed. I always wanted to be a pilot and was fortunate that my high school offered an aviation course. I took the class, and by the time I signed up for my first flying lesson I had already passed my written exams and was ready to focus on the mechanics of flying a plane. Getting the classroom learning out of the way early made my flight training much easier.

With few women in senior leadership positions, another obstacle to attracting more women pilots is the absence of female mentors. This may be an organizational blind spot for aviation: In our survey, nearly all of the senior women managers interviewed cited it as a key recruitment and retention challenge versus less than half of the male executives.

Looming shortfall

Airlines will have to figure out ways to overcome these negatives quickly, because the pilot shortage is already upon us. The FAA once said that the US would need to train 87 new airline pilots every day for the next 20 years to keep up with demand, which gives a sense of the scope of the shortage.

In the decade ending 2038, Boeing predicts global aviation will require as many as 804,000 new pilots — 645,000 of which will be needed by commercial airlines. Most of that demand will come from Asia, with the US a close second. Yet, despite the growth in the number of passengers and flights, there are more than 30 percent fewer pilots today than in the 1980s. Airlines around the world are already being forced to cancel flights because of they can’t find enough pilots.

Why so few pilots, male or female? First, the pilot pipeline is broken: In the 1980s, two-thirds of airline pilots were ex-military — veterans of wars in Korea and Vietnam. That percentage is now less than one-third and dwindling by the day. While the US military is still training pilots, today’s combat is often conducted by unmanned drones rather than fighter jets, which means fewer pilots are needed.

On top of that, many of those Vietnam War-era airline pilots also face mandatory retirement at 65. Between 2018 and 2021, the number retiring from active service is expected to rise by more than 45 percent.

Expensive pursuit

Another big obstacle for those interested in flying is the time and money it takes to become an airline pilot. To fly commercially, it can cost as much as $100,000 and requires at least 1,500 hours of flying time to earn an air transport pilot’s license. That can take anywhere from 18 to 30 months to log. For those who choose the academic route, there’s also the cost of a four-year college degree. To work your way up to captain will mean several thousand more hours of flight time and years on the job.

 Getting an aviation degree at a four-year university, as my daughter is, opens another avenue to flying. As many as 100 schools now offer one, including Purdue, Ohio State, Auburn, and my alma mater, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. This approach lets you get your ground work training out of the way in a formal college environment, making your actual flight training more efficient. It can also ready you to become a flight instructor, where you can start earning money as you rack up the necessary flight hours.

Eager to find new candidates, many carriers are willing to foot some or all of the bill for training, and a few have even bought flight schools to boost recruitment efforts. Several India-based airlines, the most successful at recruiting women at this point, offer certain on-the-job benefits aimed specifically at attracting women including child care services and non-flying maternity work options.

Who will step up to make sure there are enough pilots? My daughter for one — and hopefully, lots of other women.