The Pilot Shortage and the 1500 Hour Rule

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Mark is an FAA Certificated Flight Instructor flying in the Midwestern and Eastern United States.

What is a pilot shortage, and do we really have one?

(Note: a few days after I published this, Carl Valeri, Aviation Careers Podcast, posted an episode that discusses the current pilot shortage. He analyzes it from a slightly different perspective than I did here. I think his analysis is a great complement to mine.)

Simply put, a pilot shortage, in this context, means the airlines need more pilots than they can currently hire. Yes, it’s a bit more complicated than that, but that’s the gist. The major airlines typically have more candidates than they have pilot slots, and that’s still true for the most part, but see my discussion about the effect of the pandemic below. Right now the real shortage is in the regional airlines and, to a lesser extent, the low-cost carriers.

After many years of a declining pilot population, the United States has seen an increase in the total number of certificated pilots since 2017. In the 1980s there were over 600,000 non-student pilots in the US. By 2016, that number had declined to just over 450,000. That’s a decrease of 25% while the general population increased nearly 50%. Or, put another way, the pilot population decreased from 0.27% to 0.14% of the general population.

I suspect the primary reason for the reduced number of pilots is the increase in cost. Gas prices have increased, the cost of airplanes has increased, the fee for instructors has increased. When I was learning to fly, you could expect to spend under $5,000 to get your private pilot’s certificate. Today, it could easily cost you as much at $15,000. Even accounting for inflation, that’s a big increase.

Other than cost, I can only speculate. In the 1960s, the space program was huge, prompting many kids to seek careers in engineering and aviation. There were others who became interested in flight as a hobby because of the space program. But after the Apollo program, the media just didn’t seem interested in space anymore, unless there was an accident to cover. I have to imagine the lack of coverage resulted in fewer kids growing up thinking about aviation.

Another thing that has changed is the prestige of being an airline pilot. There’s a scene in the movie Catch Me if You Can where Leonardo DiCaprio sees a flight crew at a hotel. In the scene, everyone seems to be in awe of the flight crew. Kids even run up to the captain and ask for his autograph. Sure, it’s a little over the top, but at one time, an airline pilot was something special. How many kids in the 1960s and ’70s saw the flight crew and said “I want to be a pilot when I grow up?” Now most people seem to think pilots walking through the terminal are their personal customer service reps. The public doesn’t see pilots the way they used to.

Whatever the reason for the decrease in people looking to become pilots, the result has been fewer pilots available for the airlines. But it hasn’t just from fewer civilian pilots.

Airlines used to rely heavily on pilots leaving the military. Learning to fly in the military, then going to the airlines, was a common career path. This, along with recruitment struggles, forced the armed services to extend the commitment for pilots well beyond the standard four-year agreement most of the non-pilots sign. Today, the Air Force requires a ten-year commitment after pilot training (approximately two years). The Navy requires eight years. After ten to twelve years, some just choose to finish their career in the military and retire after twenty years of service. While some of those may decide to look into flying for an airline at that point, many don’t.

The airlines could probably absorb that loss, even with the reduction in civilian candidates except for two big factors. First, a large fraction of the airline pilot pool is approaching age 65, the mandatory retirement age for an airline pilot. Second, the requirements to become an airline pilot have significantly increased in the past ten years.

The 1500 Hour Rule

Prior to 2013, to be an airline pilot, you just had to have a Commercial Pilot certificate. This certificate only requires 250 hours of flight experience (among other requirements). A pilot would not typically be able to actually get a job flying at an airline with just a wet Commercial certificate, but by 500 hours, an airline job was not unrealistic. These low-time pilots could only fly as First Officers (copilots to the non-pilot), but they were still working for a regional airline, getting paid to build time until they reached 1500 hours. At that point, they would be eligible to take their Airline Transport Pilot (ATP) certificate checkride and upgrade to Captain.

Then, in February 2009, Colgan Air flight 3407 crashed in New York.

The families of passengers who died on that flight lobbied Congress to enact regulations to improve the safety of regional airline carriers. One of the changes to come out of this was the requirement for both the Captain and the First Officer of an airline flight to have an ATP certificate. (Although the rule itself isn’t called the “1500 Hour Rule,” an ATP certificate usually requires 1500 flight hours, leading many to call it that.)

There are a lot of things that can be argued about the implementation of that rule, and I’ll do another post on that subject another day. But increasing the flight experience requirement to fly for an airline by 600% is clearly going to reduce the candidate pool for airlines to hire from. It takes a long time to accumulate an additional 1250 hours.

But the issue goes way beyond the time. It’s a question of money. In the 1990s, a potential pilot candidate could go from student pilot to multi-engine commercial pilot for under $25,000. Today, that number is closer to $100,000. And you still need to build another 1200 hours of experience before the airlines will even look at you. Additionally, up until recently, to be hired by a major airline, you needed a four-year college degree, so throw in another $100,000 for that.

But airline pilots make a lot of money. Surely that $200,000 investment is worth it, right?

Well, in 2013, when the “1500 Hour Rule” went into effect, the average starting pay for a starting regional airline pilot was less than $20,000 a year. After five to seven years, you might be able to upgrade to captain with a massive increase in pay to $50,000 a year. Even when you reached your forever home, a legacy airline, starting pay wasn’t spectacular. A pilot starting an airline career could count on seven to ten years before finally starting to make good money.

And when the requirement was 250 hours, these salaries made sense. As an inexperienced commercial pilot, you would pay your dues with your time rather than money. To some extent, that’s still true today. To build time, most pilots take jobs as flight instructors or pipeline patrol pilots that don’t pay very well. But that’s better than paying another $150,000 to build the rest of your time.

A Pilot Shortage or a Pay Shortage?

There have been many pundits over the past several years claiming that the issue isn’t a lack of pilots, but a lack of pay. The increase in requirements to become an airline pilot would seem to make that somewhat obvious. Only someone incredibly motivated—or incredibly wealthy—would spend that kind of money for a starting salary that low. You could literally make more flipping burgers at a fast-food joint.

But that’s changing now. Starting pay at the regionals has gone up significantly, especially in the last year. Starting pay for First Officers at most airlines is now better than $80,000 a year. That’s certainly enough money to entice prospective pilots. Most airlines have even dropped the four-year degree from their hiring requirements. That means a fresh high school graduate can expect to meet the minimum requirements for a regional airline job before his twenty-first birthday. I can’t even imagine earning more than $80K when I was 21.

And, at first glance, the increase in pay seems to be doing the trick. Right now, in early 2023, every regional airline is overloaded with First Officer candidates. Most airlines have canceled classes for First Officers until fall, while others have reduced class sizes or cut back on the number of classes they run every month. During the spring and Summer of 2022, candidates could find themselves in class six to eight weeks from the time they hit submit on their applications. Now candidates are lucky to get an interview in that time.

So does that mean the pilot shortage is over?

How the Pandemic Made Things Worse

Airline hiring came to a screeching halt during the pandemic. Classes were canceled, job offers were rescinded, and interviews stopped. There was very little flying happening, and the future was uncertain. Experts predicted that most flying wouldn’t return for at least two years and the airlines wouldn’t see pre-pandemic flying numbers until 2024 or 2025. With revenue decreased to almost nothing, the airlines were faced with a big problem. Even without the cost of actually flying their aircraft, they still had expenses. That included paying pilots. (Note that pilots are only one part of an airline’s payroll. There are a lot of important people that make flights happen, but this article specifically about pilots, so I’m not going into the others here.)

Pilot furloughing is a complicated topic that is beyond the scope of this article, but for the purposes of this discussion, just understand that an airline can’t just tell the pilots to go home and that they’re not getting paid. If an airline wants to furlough, they have to send out notices at least sixty days prior. Since pilots’ contracts require the airline pay each pilot a guaranteed minimum number of hours every month, that’s two months of almost full salaries for flights that weren’t happening. Additionally, furloughs are incredibly disruptive. Airlines really don’t want to furlough pilots if they can avoid it. A short furlough can actaully be more expensive than just paying their pilots.

So the airlines got creative, offering special “no flying” bids to pilots in exchange for fewer hours of pay than the contractual minimum, voluntary leaves of absence, and voluntary half or full month unpaid time off. And most importantly to this discussion, they all offered some form of voluntary early retirement to their older pilots.

These VEOPs (Voluntary Early Out Programs) seemed like a good idea at the time. Pilots who were looking to retire in the next three years could retire early, reducing the airlines’ payroll and benefits obligations during the expected period of reduced demand. It was one factor that helped reduce (and in some cases eliminate) the number of pilots furloughed.

Beyond the measures taken by the airlines, pilot numbers at the passenger airlines were further reduced by those who chose to move to private and corporate flight departments or the suddenly booming air cargo industry. Still others decided the pilot career was just too volatile for their liking and left the industry altogether.

All of this, along with a lot of government money, kept the US Airline industry afloat throughout the pandemic, thought it didn’t prevent furloughs entirely. Still, the early retirements and pilots voluntarily leaving the airlines seemed, at the time, to be A Good Thing.

That is until the summer of 2021.

That summer air travel demand came roaring back faster than anyone anticipated and the airlines were caught flat-footed. They scrambled to get pilots back into the cockpit, which in many cases meant simulator training to get them back up to speed. Unfortunately, there are only so many simulators and instructors available. There was a major logjam in the training centers as airlines recalled their furloughed pilots.

Now the airlines suddenly found themselves short of qualified pilots. Even if they could have waved a magic wand and made all of their pilots legally current, they still had to replace the pilots they lost. At the major airlines, this meant hiring experienced pilots from the regionals. For the regionals, it meant hiring new First Officers. But with the backlog of training, getting new pilots on the line was frustratingly slow, for both the airlines and the pilots.

Throughout 2021 and into 2022, new hires were finding their initial training stalled as they waited for simulator availability. Then they had to wait for instructor availability to do their Initial Operational Experience after their checkrides.

A Captain Shortage

What happened next was predictable. With the legacy airlines hiring regional captains, the low cost carriers began looking at the experienced regional first officers. That meant that regional airlines’ most experienced pilots were being hired away. In response, the summer of 2022 saw regional airline pilot pay nearly double from an average of $45,000 for a starting First Officer to over $80,000.

The real reason for this increase in pay wasn’t to attract new pilots, though. It was intended to prevent the experienced pilots from leaving. Top captain pay at a regional airline jumped to nearly $200,000 year base pay. In addition, many regionals instituted retention bonuses to incentivize pilots to stay with the airline long enough to upgrade to captain and stick around for a few years after.

That’s because without a captain, a plane can’t fly. At a minimum, an airline needs one captain for every first officer (more really due to the way seniority works, but that’s math beyond this discussion). The conventional wisdom says that when an airline hires a pilot, that pilot must upgrade to captain and then fly as a captain long enough to cover the upgrade of one first officer for the airline to break even. These days, that means 1,000 hours as a regional captain, the minimum amount of time a first officer needs to upgrade.

So what the regional airlines are seeing right now is a shortage of captains, not pilots. Unfortunately, the only cure for this problem is for the majors to slow down hiring so the regionals can hold on to their captains and experienced first officers longer.

Even the majors are seeing captain shortages, though. Every month there are open captain slots at the less desirable bases. I suspect this shortage will resolve itself, however. The pay is too good to not upgrade, and some of the vacancies are a result of training resources still being maxed out. The legacies and most of the low-cost carriers will make it through this storm relatively unharmed.

The regional airlines, however, are another story. Not all of them will survive.

So Is There Really a Pilot Shortage Then?

The short answer is yes, there is definitely a pilot shortage. Even though it’s difficult for a pilot who just reached 1500 hours to get a job right now, that’s a pipeline issue, not a lack of demand. Just recently, American Airlines announced it was cutting over 50,000 flights from its summer schedule, in part due to lack of pilots. Other airlines have announced similar cuts because they’re all in the same boat.

The major airlines can only hire as many pilots as they have the capacity to train. Like the regionals, they need more captains than first officers and they are still trying to replace the captains they lost during the pandemic. The real problem is that more are retiring every year, and those numbers will increase over the next few years. Throw in projected growth and we have a shortage. Experts are predicting that shortage will be as much as 30,000 pilots by 2032 in North America alone.

In the short term, the regional airlines are taking the brunt of the shortage. With not enough captains, they’re struggling to fulfill their commitments to the mainline carriers. All of the regional airlines have been forced to park some of their planes. Some regional carriers have parked more than half of their fleet. Recently American Airlines severed its partnership agreement with Mesa Airlines for their inablilty to cover their required flying. Mesa blamed these issues on lack of pilots. I doubt this will be the last such divorce.

Not everyone agrees though. Most notably, ALPA (the Air Line Pilots Association, the world’s largest ariline pilot union) has publicly said on many occasions that the issue isn’t the lack of pilots, but the lack of pilot pay. On the surface, their argument is compelling, but I think they’re skewing the numbers a bit. They point out that since 2013 there have been almost 52,000 new pilots, but the airlines have only hired 30,000 pilots. I’m not sure where they got these numbers, but the fact is that there were 478,801 non-student certificated pilot in 2013 and 476,346 in 2022, according to the FAA. There was an increase in ATP certificates, however, from 148,824 in 2013 to 166,738 in 2022. Using ALPA’s estimate of 30,000 new airline pilots, that’s a shortage of more than 12,000 pilots.

ALPA is trying to say, though, is that the airlines need to do a better job of enticing new pilots with better pay and quality of life rather than lobbying for lower requirements for airline pilots. In that, I agree with them. Our airlines are the safest in the world, and have been since 2010, with no major airline accidents and no airline fatalities since 2009. At no other time in the history of aviation has that been true. It’s something to be proud of, and something we should strive to continue.

But that doesn’t mean that a pilot shortage doesn’t exist.