The COVID-19 pandemic is becoming more and more in the rearview of Americans’ lives, but some lingering effects are affecting growth and recovery.
The United States is experiencing a shortage of airplane pilots as a two-fold result of older pilots retiring before the next generation has flown enough hours to obtain full-time positions.
“Right now, the overriding challenge in the airline industry is the shortage of pilots. There’s shortages of technical skills, mechanics, all sorts of labor shortages in our country, but the pilot shortage is a very significant one,” said Mike Mooney, a Midwest Airlines original employee from 1984 to 2003 who has been in consulting for 20 years. Across the nation, rural air service is facing a crisis. The shortage of pilots is constraining expansion and restoration from the pandemic.
Mooney, a small airport development expert, said regional carriers are most affected by the pilot shortage.
“Everybody is short of pilots,” he said Monday afternoon at Blue Ridge Community College in an air travel update hosted by the Shenandoah Valley Regional Airport.
Mooney said the pilot shortage is not helped by the fact that pilot productivity is down with the average pilot logging 68 hours of flying per month since the pandemic, instead of 70 hours per month.
In June 2023, stats confirm that domestic air traffic was up only .6 percent from June 2019, but was up .13 percent compared to June 2022.
While leisure air travel has fully recovered from the pandemic, Mooney said that business travel has experienced “fundamental changes” which may or may not be permanent.
The cost of the average airplane fare is up 16 percent from just earlier this year, and the cost of crude oil to fuel the planes is also rising.
According to Mooney, 74 American cities have lost the big three network airlines, American, Delta and United, since 2020. Twelve cities have lost all air service since the pandemic.
“It is not a good situation right there in terms of maintaining jet service,” Mooney said.
The pilot shortage is expected to worsen. In 2023, 13,500 pilots are needed, but it is predicted that by 2032, the air travel industry will be short 17,000 pilots.
In the first quarter of 2023, Virginia generated 9.1 million passengers by air. The industry experienced growth from 2014 until the pandemic in 2020. The number of flights, however, has decreased by 9 percent since 2014 while aircraft size has increased by 46 percent.
The airport in Weyers Cave has goals for the future, including increasing from two to three frequencies of flights to Charlotte, N.C.
In 14 years, the airport has had six carriers and four brands. A large portion of passengers flying out of Shenandoah Valley Regional Airport are traveling to California and other western states.
“You’ve kind of been the poster child for the challenges we’ve had,” Mooney said of airports across the U.S.
Airports saw an increase in passenger travel up until the pandemic.
“It shows you that airlines can see the potential here.”
Contour, which has its own flight school to train pilots, took over at the Weyers Cave airport in late 2022 and added nine new cities to the scheduled within six months. Estimated revenue for the carrier in 2024 is $200 million.
One thousand flights enter and depart Charlotte each day, which is why the Hub is planning a sixth runway.
“It’s a delay-proned hub,” Mooney said of the drawback of a larger airport.
Mooney said that everyone should be concerned about the national pilot shortage, because it threatens service everywhere. Wyoming is the poster child for rural air service participation as it works on state funding for rural air service. Michigan and Mississippi are following suit.
Historically, the U.S. military could be relied upon as a pipeline for commercial pilots, but not so much now because the military is having pilot retention issues.
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Rebecca Barnabi
