The retention of pilots is becoming a crisis for business airlines, commercial airlines, and military leading to the situation to only get worse. The aviation industry will only grow from this point on due to its key advantages for its transportation and with that, a larger number of pilots will be needed. This becomes one of the stress factors that comes with the job for pilots along with many others. The stress may be too much for pilots that it’s even causing them to decline hefty retention bonuses. As you can see many factors affect this shortage of pilots and I see it as the problem worsening in the future if no solutions are found to resolve this issue. There has been plenty of proof that the industry of aviation has been …show more content…
The current pilots are the ones making up for the gap by elongating their working hours, which can cause stress to them and to their families. Along with any profession, working 12 hours shifts, 6 days a week can certainly cause fatigue to the body, not only physically, but mentally as well. Another component that relates to this fatigue is constantly crossing over different time zones which everyone knows causes jet lag. With this career field, pilots do not get the leeway to allow fatigue to take control of them when on the job. This in which leads to another stress factor, the responsibility that comes with the occupation. When in flight many things can happen, equipment malfunction or turbulence are often the trouble. With this it can be stressful to know that it is up to you, the pilot, to resist any qualms that may be felt, and to resolve any errors for the safety of their lives and/or the several hundreds of people that may be onboard. These multiple factors may even be too much to handle for the current pilots because it has been reported that some are even declining their retention bonuses. Both military and commercial airlines are trying to increase pilots bonuses due to the constant stress pilots are eventually declining to extend their career. “Pilots are burning out as increased operations leave the USAF stretched thin” (A.Burns
Retention is one of the key prerequisites for or outcomes of learning that can either be reinforced positively as well as negatively or otherwise optimized with respect to how the study time is to be distributed across sessions. Intuitively, it would appear plausible that, increasing the uninterrupted study duration would map into superior retention and learning outcomes. The present paper critically addresses some empirical findings that could question the unaided intuition along these lines while shedding light on the interaction channels or trade-offs to be defined across a set of additional explanatory variables.
As a result, consideration to the circadian rhythm of a body is a significant function for people working in aviation industry. In fact, Maintenance personnel, who do rotating shift, have to be encounter with social and biological rhythms with regard to their exact working environment (Wise, Hopkin, and Garland 2010, p, 245). “In 2008, an FAA Conference on fatigue revealed that: scientists, regulators, company management, and labor representatives all agree that personnel fatigue is a recognized safety hazard in the aviation maintenance industry, and we
There is a shortage in airline pilots which has caused delays long layovers, and late arrivals. This is in part due to the cost of becoming a pilot. Both government regulations and cost to the private individual and public option has choked the ability for individual to start on the journey of aviation. Garvey (2016) from the American pilot association also list these and other contributors in Aviation Week & Space Technology, p15-15. 1p. (Pilot Population—Commercial and Private—Dwindling) DUNS Number: 003251972
The responsibility of a commercial airline pilot is not only to get their passengers from
In the medical field, residents’ work hours were reduced down to 80 hours per week in 2003, and the ACGME is still proposing further restrictions. Outside of the medical field, truck drivers are limited to solely eleven hours of driving, given a ten-hour break; along with railroad workers, who must also take a ten-hour break before starting a shift. Another time demanding profession is aviation, in which their administration allows pilots to fly only sixteen consecutive hours, and if a flight delay were to extend that pilot’s shift, then they must switch (Townsend & Anderson, 2013). It is said that the IOM only limits nurses to work twelve hours in a twenty-four hour period, although it is not implemented very well and there is research to prove it.
It is known that Canada will be faced with a labour shortage by 2030 and there are quite a few reasons behind this issue. The aging of the baby-boom generation is limiting the labour force growth and to make things worse, there are low fertility rates. Lower birth rates and the aging population indicate that there will be an issue filling these labour gaps. The baby boomers are retiring and there are not enough youth to take over their positions in the labour force. Due to the retiring of these workers, careers such as air pilots, flight engineers and flying instructors will face this shortage. These labour shortages will continue to become more severe as the number of retirees grow and the number of youth decline. Another contributing
With an instrument rating, a pilot can transport either good or people from Point A, to Point B (Instrument Rating). The pilot can either remain a private pilot now, or has a choice to work for a regional airline, who flies within the country. First, A pilot applies for interviews at many different airlines of his choosing. The pilot is then interviewed, and is sent an offer by an airline. If the pilot accepts the offer, he or she is then taken into their “Airline Training Course”, in which they learn the basic rules of the airline and how they operate (“Interview with Reno”). The pilot then has one more chance to decide whether they like the airline or not, if they like it, they will be accepted as a first officer or co-pilot. The pilot then gets to pick whether he wants to fly for the regional airline for the rest of his/her career, or if he will move to work for the main airline. From this point forward, a pilot’s daily life will become very abnormal.
The film Flight club which was original based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk has been a movie that has gained a strong cult following. I myself have seen this film dozens of times but I’ve never looked at it through a psychological perspective, until now. The character in this film who remains unknown for the entirety of the film lives in a city that is dark and pretty run down. “This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time”. This is a pretty famous quote from the beginning of the film that I’ve seen plenty of times and it really helps set the tone for how the movie is. The narrator of the story is an employee of a business which remains unknown, he’s an insomniac who appears to have constant fear
In the wake of a sizable slump in demand driven by economic downturns, terrorism attacks (especially the events of September 11, 2001) as well as increased competition from low-cost carriers, many incumbent U.S. airlines have been attempting a fundamental restructuring of their operations. Many would argue that a central element in this restructuring should include an overhaul of the labor-management relationship.
United Airlines is very proud of the current culture and specifically seeks to hire pilots who are a positive addition to its pilot group. The first step as a pilot applicant is to take a job fit assessment. This is approximately a four hundred question true or false test that is designed to asses an individual’s personality in comparison to the current United pilot group. Upon my successful completion, I was invited to interview. From the day I stepped on the property to interview the positive culture of United has been apparent. The airline recognizes the importance of fostering a positive culture and how it directly relates to employee satisfaction and customer service. During initial training the expectation of being a team player
The past is always recognized because it paves the way for the future. Many people study the past to make advancements so past happenings will not be repeated in the future. Looking back in the past for pilots, that job type has always been risky. There has always been the risk in flying a hunk of metal in the sky for miles trying to keep the plane steady with out crashing while facing adversity like turbulence and rain, but now there is an added worry to also losing control of the plane. Pilots now also must worry about extremists potentially hijacking the plane. There have been previous plane hijackings in the
The trend toward aircraft without pilots is not new. As technology has improved the number of crew members and their responsibilities have steadily decreased. The Boeing B-29, the most technologically advanced aircraft of the day, required five people to operate the aircraft; pilot, co-pilot, flight engineer, navigator and radio operator. This does not include the four gunners and bombardier required for combat operations. (Mann, 2009) Compare this with modern airliners that carry a crew of one pilot and one copilot. The flight engineer, navigator, and to some degree the radio operator, have been replaced by computers.
The management system at Delta Airlines has always been founded on a “family-oriented” approach; with an emphasis of long-term job security in exchange for employee loyalty. In an attempt to recover from significant revenue losses, the company was forced to turn away from the family business approach during the financial turmoil which affected the entire airline industry in the early 1990s. This change was very disconcerting for the employees, who began exploring options to unionize. Fortunately, the company returned to a business model which 1) restored employee confidence; and 2) provided employees with the opportunity to become emotionally invested in the future success of the organization.
For the past ten years, pilots at Alaska Airlines have been underpaid, and now, after merging with Virgin America, pilots are protesting Alaska’s negligence. In 2005, Alaska pilots had pay cuts of 26% when the airline industry lost an estimated $7.4B (IATA, 2005) due to fuel price surges (James, Andrea, 2007). Since then, fuel prices have fallen significantly; pilots at Alaska have been paid less than those at other legacy airlines, such as Delta or United (Glassdoor, 2017). According to self-reporting surveys, Alaska Airline pilots earn on average $107,860 a year while Virgin pilots earn around $100,00 a year (Glassdoor, 2017). Compared to a legacy airline like Delta, with an average pilot salary of $137,587 per year (Glassdoor, 2017), Alaska and Virgin do not pay their pilots competitively. The merger with Virgin increased dissatisfaction with their compensation, leading to pilots at Alaska speaking out against the company, specifically through the creation of an awareness campaign “This Merger Won’t Fly” to rally against the inequitable pay (“This Merger Won’t Fly", 2017). Pilots, backed by the support of their unions, are negatively impacting flights and consumers by leveraging their salience as stakeholders. Although passengers choose airlines based on price, 87% of respondents to a survey said employee strikes will cause them to book with a different airline (see Figure III). Horizon Air, an LCC subsidiary of Alaska Air Group, has been suffering the most from the
A leading cause in fatigue in pilots is the long hours and times of commuting between flights. Especially at the entry-level flying positions, as a result of the low pay, pilots cannot afford to live near major airports and are required to drive for a long period of time, which can further aggravate exhaustion. Along with that, many airlines require their pilots to operate through bases which are different