Well, yeah. Stop building airplanes for a while, and they get expensive. They get expensive, people don’t want to spend the money to fly them.
This is just a new version of an old story. The boom years in general aviation lasted through the 1970’s when both the number of student pilots plummeted but the entire small airplane manufacturing industry essentially stopped making new planes until the mid-1990’s. It is an expensive hobby with lots of competition from other pursuits. I love it more than anything but it isn’t really very practical as a transportation option for most people either. 9-11 screwed things up in small ways as well. I remember taking my first flight after that day a few months later and the airplanes were all carefully locked up and you needed keys to get to them and had to undergo questioning. It wasn’t the worst idea in the world but it is kind of a buzzkill when you could just hop in and take off before.
Your thread title can be read multiple ways BTW. I am glad that a lot of student pilots aren’t crashing all over the U.S.
That thought did occur to me, but I left it that way for two reasons: First, that’s the NPR headline; and second, I smiled at the ambiguity. 
Canberra, Australia’s national capital, a city with a population of almost 350,000, now has no flight training available. 10 years ago there were six flight schools at the airport. The closest training facility I know of is a two and a half hour drive away.
Interesting…I was under the impression that there was an oversupply of potential pilots.
Any idea how many people train to be pilots for personal/recreational flying, versus those who aspire to become commercial pilots?
I wonder how much the stories in recent years about the poor pay of junior commercial pilots is affecting these decisions?
I heard it doesn’t pay very well. Perhaps thats why?
It’s famine for a couple of years but the pay increases rapidly after that.
I think the industry has a horrible reputation, particularly in the US.
I’ve expected a shortage for awhile. Now with the economy dropping the number of flight school students, I see it being more likely.
Anecdotally, our flight school has laid off about half the instructors, and taken several planes off the line. We’re training about 60% of the students we had 3 years ago. The majority of these are foreign students who will return home after their training. My personal student load was almost entirely “private” pilots; Older guys successful in their careers who’d always wanted a pilot’s license. Many of these bought and learned in their own airplanes. I’ve gone from 6 students to one (and he’s almost finished). Since I’ve finished training my son, I doubt if I’ll fly much after next month.
In 2008 (iirc) A new US law went into effect allowing the maximum age of flight crews to rise from 60 to 65, but I wonder it only delayed the shortage for 5 years? It’ll be interesting to see if we have higher pilot shortages in 2013.
Personally, I hope for a shortage. I’ve got a youngster who’s trying to break into the biz.
When I was learning to fly helicopters in the mid-'90s, one of my instructors said he’d made $6,000 the previous year. In L.A., which has excellent flying weather and where $6,000 doesn’t go very far. (He owns the company now, which seems a much better situation than instructing.)
ISTM that in the '70s it was a lot easier to learn to fly. Airplanes were relatively cheap, since there were a ton of them. My dad bought a six-year-old Cessna 172K in 1976 for ten kilobucks. Even with the recession in the '70s people were still able to fly. After they stopped making airplanes, used ones became much more expensive. A decade after buying his Skyhawk, which I learned in in the '80s, and which dad and I flew many trips in, and which was in rental service, dad just about doubled his money when he sold it. He doubled his money on the Skylane when he sold that one, too. Nowadays a new Skyhawk costs about a quarter-million dollars, and a ten-year-old one is about half of that. It used to be that any solidly middle-class person who wanted to could aspire to airplane ownership, or at least be able to rent regularly. Now, not so much.
Things changed in the '80s and '90s. As flying became more expensive, jobs seem to have become less secure. People worried about being laid off probably don’t spend as much on their hobbies. And it seems people are less interested in flying. Why? Is it because the rising costs and the less-secure job situations made people forget about flying? Is it because people wanted to buy BMWs and Porsches and snort coke instead of flying? Is it because pilot salaries have declined, and people can make a better living without such intensive training?
The supply situation has been improving for a bit over a decade. Cessna has been building airplanes. Piper has had its ups and downs, but it still in business. I haven’t heard anything about Beechcraft (Raytheon), but they’ve pretty much targeted the upscale market anyway. There are lots of new manufacturers making Light Sport aircraft. But a 40-year-old Skyhawk will still set you back 40 or 50 kilobucks.
With the economy the way it is, it’s not surprising that there are fewer people learning to fly. But I think that with the troubles GA has had in the last 30 years people just forgot. With fewer pilots, fewer people are exposed to GA. And those who want to fly look at the career opporunities and hear about the $20,000 starting salaries and the woman who couldn’t afford to live where she worked and commuted across the country, resulting in fatigue and her crash. Pilots love to fly, but they need to make a salary they can live on.
I’ll never make a career in flying, but I’d like to be able to afford to fly. If I could, I’d be offering rides to people – especially younger people – to get them thinking Aviation. And maybe they’d make a career of it.
Having a private plane, for personal use, now carries a stigma of environmental disregard that was previously unrealized by the multitudes, I think. That stigma outweighs the ego boost that such conspicuous displays of personal wealth once carried. Just my opinion.
I was under the impression that one couldn’t really break into the major airlines unless you were ex-military and that most pilots for major airlines got their experience in the military.
Why would that dry up?
Methinks this is similar to other labor ‘shortages’ in that they cannot find enough people to work at a low salary.
I don’t know that the general population knows the ‘miles per gallon’ of a General Aviation aircraft, or that they know that avgas is leaded. (ISTR that 100LL – ‘low lead’ – has more lead than mogas did. I don’t know if that’s true.)
I don’t know about ‘conspicuous consumption’. Most people don’t park their planes in their driveways or take them to the market. Dad had two planes on his Civil Servant’s salary, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at our house. OTOH, I’ve seen airplane owners who had nicer, newer, faster, more expensive planes who also had large houses and expensive cars. If I had a plane (or better, a helicopter) no one could tell by looking at my house and cars. (They’d know because I’d talk about it incessantly! 
) If I lived in a McMansion and had a Porsche and an Escalade in the driveway and people found out that I had an aircraft, then that would add fuel to the conspicuous consumption image (and make me look like more of an asshole than I am).
It used to be that most of the pilots were ex-mil. There was WWII, Korea, and then Vietnam. As those pilots aged, more pilots started coming in without military experience. Certainly there are military pilots who become commercial pilots (why am I thinking of Louis Gossett Jr yelling at Richard Gere in An Officer And A Gentleman?), but I think (but do not know) that most pilots now work their way up from private pilots. My friend may have become a civilian heli pilot after she got out of the Army, but she couldn’t afford the training.
With fewer people who can afford the training, or the idea just doesn’t occur to them, and with the low starting salaries that are especially low compared to the expectations new college grads have had fairly recently, plus more (primarily regional) airlines, the pool is drying up.
But there’s always a shortage of airline pilots. I know this from the ads flight schools place in the magazines! 
I’ve been told 100LL has 4x the lead content of mogas. At any rate, it now represents the largest single source of airborne lead contamination, and is likely to be replaced by 94UL (100LL without the Pb) in a few years.
Me neither, but still, a private airplane is a luxury good by any reasonable definition. When times are tight, or even feel tight, it’s at the top of the list of places to cut back.
But then, most of your neighbors and friends would be in a similar financial status themselves, right?
Because the supply of ex-military pilots has largely dried up. There aren’t as many anymore. Some military pilots find they have better career prospects in the military. The civilian route (private pilot, instructor, freight dog, bizjets) to the airline cockpit is probably more common now.
That’s it. There has never been a shortage of people who want to fly, even have to fly in a way, and since 1978 deregulation the wages have simply gone to the point where just enough of them will take the job. Even at the top end, pay isn’t great and scheduling and working conditions are still poor. Airline pilots typically need second jobs just to pay the bills.
So where are the student pilots? The ones who really want to as a hobby can’t afford it, the less-committed get impatient with the homework and rules involved and quit, and the career-focused ones realize they can’t make careers out of it.
The US Air Force (and other branches of military? I forget where I read this…) is training fewer pilots than before. There are lots of pilots of unmanned aircraft, but they get to stay on the ground and never crash. These pilots are not ready to work in commercial aviation once they leave the military.
Becoming a commercial airline pilot is cost-prohibitive for a civilian. Last I looked into it, getting your CPL with all relevant ratings costs an average of $50 000. At this point, you still aren’t actually allowed to fly a commercial plane, since you need experience and an Air Transport License. As much as some people wish to be pilots, they just can’t afford to do it.
The same is true in a lot of other areas of the industry. I recall speaking with an Air Safety Investigator who told me that a lot of investigators are former (military) flight engineers, with an in-depth knowledge of aircraft systems and the cockpit environment. There aren’t any flight engineers anymore; computers do so much of their job. In the long-run, finding people with a broad enough experience to be good investigators will be harder.
There’s a predicted shortage of Aircraft Maintenance Technicians too, though with the inevitable layoff cycles and union rules associated with this career, the older/more experienced AMTs keep their jobs while the younger guys don’t get to work, but the younger guys will one day be the older guys, and they’ll have less actual experience…
It’s going to be an interesting industry in 10-20 years.
I wouldn’t call it “rapidly,” based on an average pilot’s career progression. Someone taking the civilian route is likely to have spent several years flying as a First Officer at the 30-35k range before upgrading to the Captain’s seat, where it will take another few years to reach the 50k mark.
Yes, some experiences may vary depending on hiring booms/furloughs, but it’s certainly not a rapid rise to a respectable pay scale. Still, there is never a true pilot shortage, and never will be, so long as there are accelerated training courses designed to take someone from zero to hero in less than a year. The only thing that happens is that the airlines are forced to draw from a less and less experienced pool of applicants.
Shortages seem to hit certain sectors of aviation at certain times. A few years ago there was a lot of hiring by airlines in my part of the world. This stripped the turboprop operators of captains and they both didn’t have enough experienced FOs to upgrade and fill the spots and, more importantly, the minimum requirements to get work with the turboprop companies was the same as what you needed for a job with the jet companies, so all the low hour guys were going straight to jets rather than progressing through the feeder companies. The turboprop operators lost their captains and the resumes stopped coming in so replacements were near impossible to find. But was it really a shortage? The airlines didn’t perceive a shortage, they had plenty of talent to hire from, the piston engine companies didn’t perceive a shortage, new pilots still had to get a thousand hours or so before they’d get a look at a jet, but the turboprop companies that had traditionally been a training ground for jet pilots were being side stepped. The result was that companies were hiring direct entry captains from overseas just to keep aeroplanes in the air. It was a shortage, but it only affected a specific part of the industry.
I’ll think things are starting to look better for pilots when I see the cheap airlines paying for type ratings.
Edit: As for private flying and charter flying that’s going to track the economy, so it’s no surprise that there are fewer students out there.
You know, when you use the phrase “pilots down” I’m thinking crashes, not that less people are learning to become pilots. Anyway carry on.