I see the problem from the other end – the people entering the pipeline and progressing through training until they can land that coveted job of driving a bus, under abysmal working conditions, for peanuts, that would have most sane people exclaiming, “F- this, I’m outa here.” (BTW, those were the words my 2nd wife uttered to me one day shortly before divorce proceedings began.) Of course, visions of sugarplum captains’ jobs and salary dance through their heads … until the airline goes broke, gets absorbed by another airline, and their seniority number then changes to 1920502891895901218282899456.
Ok, enough seriousness. Now for some levity. Kids coming out of flight training don’t really know how to fly. How do I know this? I tend to get them at the tail-end of the training, when they are about to become CFIs. I am a long-time pilot (54 years - 12000+ hours), and CFI (25 years), who specializes in spins, Upset Prevention and Recovery Training (UPRT), and basic aerobatics. Once or twice a week I get a phone call that begins like this, “Hi, are you the guy who does spin endorsements? My friend came to you and said that they really enjoyed training with you and learned a lot. I need a spin endorsement before my CFI checkride tomorrow.”
Ok, weak attempts at humor aside, most of these kids really don’t know how their airplanes fly and yet they are probably going to be teaching other kids to fly in a couple of months. My spin endorsement class, which ends up taking a good chunk of a day because I am going to introduce them to things that have never been addressed before, like how the lift formula explains things like stalls, why V-speeds change with weight, how power controls altitude, how power controls airspeed, why when things go wrong you really want to be pushing on the yoke/stick instead of pulling, why the ailerons are your enemy in a stall, why Power/Aileron/Rudder/Elevator (PARE) is how you recover from a spin but that, if you get to that point, you have long since failed to recover the aircraft from an upset when you should have. One thing I can hand to them, they can go heads-down and work a Garmin G-1000 like nobody’s business!
The long and short of it is that I am pretty much the last chance they have to realize that their training is deficient. What’s worse is that, if my little spin class doesn’t get through, they are going to carry that deficiency over into the next batch of kids they are going to turn into professional Garmin buttonologists. They will then proceed through the system to become pilots for the airlines and freight dogs. They will be very good at running the systems in the airplane and at IFR procedures but when something goes wrong and they are forced to fly the airplane in order to deal with a problem that is either caused by or exacerbated by the automation, they will be lost … along with their crewmates, passengers, and aircraft.
So to get this comment back on track, yes, there is a shortage of pilots, if one defines ‘pilot’ as someone who understands their aircraft and can think through problems to extract a good outcome from a bad situation. The current flight training system does not naturally produce that sort of pilot. Only those who recognize this will, on their own initiative, go to the extra effort to rectify their shortcomings. Those who don’t … well, the airlines and the flying public are the losers.