20-Year Prospect
It's all sunny skies and smooth sailing for America's flight instructors…or is it?
Here's the thing: the U.S. is about to get slapped with a pilot shortage. On the one hand, you've got lots of commercial pilots who'll no longer be flying because they've reached the federally-mandated retirement age of sixty-five. On the other hand, you've got new laws going into effect that make it much, much more difficult for new pilots to get a commercial license.
If you're looking for a number, we've got one – a study by the University of North Dakota projects that airlines will need to hire 60,000 pilots by 2025.
You'd think this would be great news for flight instructors…except it isn't. That same University of North Dakota study we mentioned earlier found that many aviation students are reconsidering becoming commercial pilots because they think the pay is too low, the work schedule too demanding, and the job kind of terrible for pilots with families.
And then there are the new Federal Aviation Administration rules, which require pilots to have at least 1,500 hours of flight time before they can fly a commercial aircraft. Acquiring so many hours may simply prove too expensive for most budding commercial pilots.
So, there it is, flight instructors. You should be rolling in dough and packing bodies behind the steering wheel (or whatever it's called) of your plane as you help pilots train to fly the friendly skies…but you aren't, due to lack of interest and the high cost of flight time.
We'd bet flight instructors will be around twenty years from now, because planes will probably still be the fastest way to travel from Point A to Point B. But will you be a flight instructor? Economics might make that pretty difficult.