At little airports and schools in Minnesota, push to train pilots gains velocity

One evening four years ago, Jacob Berk came to a realization watching old footage of military flights as he unwound from a shift waiting tables at Minneapolis' Rock Bottom Brewery.

He wanted to be a pilot.

"It dawned on me, this feeling of regret that I could have been doing something I loved and I wasn't and it hurt me," said Berk, who is 28. "I decided then and there to pursue the dream."

Today, with flight school done and nearly all of the required 1,500 hours of flying time built up, Berk's timing is turning out to be perfect. This year, U.S. airlines expect to hire 10,000 pilots.

A shortage of pilots is one of several constraints on airlines as demand returns to normal two years after the coronavirus pandemic brought air travel nearly to a halt. Ground agents and other workers are also in short supply. But the supply of pilots more directly affects airline operations because they perform the actual work of flying and can't be rapidly replaced.

For much of the 2010s, airlines, pilot groups and analysts debated pilot numbers. Even before the pandemic, air travel demand appeared to be outgrowing pilot staffing. And after it hit, airlines slashed schedules and staff, in part by encouraging pilots to retire early.

Delta Air Lines, the dominant carrier at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, offered early retirement packages and lost 2,000 of its 14,000 pilots in 2020.

Delta's chief executive Ed Bastian said it lost more pilots to early retirement than any other airlines — and most of the 2,000 pilots were among its most seasoned veterans.

"That means everybody, the other 12,000 pilots underneath all had opportunities to move up," Bastian said last month at an investment conference.

For pilots to move up, they could be going from first officer to captain or are often switching aircraft. Pilots have to be trained on every new type of jet they are approved to fly.

"So we're having to train the entire pilot workforce as well as recruiting in from the bottom," Bastian said. Delta is now hiring 100 to 200 pilots a month.

Minneapolis-based Sun Country Airlines, the second-largest carrier at MSP, retained most of its pilots thanks to a new cargo contract, signed just before the pandemic, with Amazon.com. The new business gave Sun Country pilots something to do when people weren't booking leisure trips.

To woo talent, Sun Country agreed to a new pilots contract in December that offered higher pay and better schedules. By the contract's fourth year, pay for senior captains is above the scale for Delta, which has had the highest pay for pilots of the Boeing 737 — the most common commercial aircraft in the skies. The airline is now hiring 20 pilots a month versus five before, said Jude Bricker, its chief executive.

Even so, Bricker added that no one in the airline industry is able to come back as rapidly as they'd like. "And the reason we're not able to grow as much as we think we should be able to mostly has to do with relying on past experience in a new environment," he said.

Regional carriers are responding to the pilot shortage by upping starting salaries, sometimes by 50%, from a previous average of around $50,000. The median annual wage for airline pilots is $207,200, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Meanwhile, pilots on the job are working more than ever.

"At the current rate, by this fall, our pilots will have flown more overtime in 2022 than in the entirety of 2018 and 2019 combined, our busiest years to date," the Air Line Pilots Association, which represents Delta's pilots, said in a letter to customers last month.

The union said it has been asking Delta's leaders to exercise restraint when adding back flights.

Delta isn't having any problem recruiting pilots, Bastian said. But getting them through training is a challenge. He said he expects it will take between eight and 12 months before enough pilots are trained to comfortably add flights.

The amount of pilot training happening right now is "at a scale that no one has seen before," said Bob Mann, an airline analyst and former industry executive. That also means flight instructors and simulators are also in high demand.

Sun Country's pilot training process now takes 110 days versus the usual 75 days because of bottlenecks with instructors and simulators, Bricker said.

At the CAE Training Center in Eagan, two new Sun Country pilots trained in a simulator on a recent afternoon. The sessions are four hours long and come as part of training that includes procedures and systems work and runs up to eight weeks, said Joe Houghton, Sun Country's vice president of flight operations.

The carrier leases simulators in other states as well but still has a backlog of new pilots that need training. Sun Country is planning to launch its own training center in fall.

Employment of airline and commercial pilots is projected to grow 13% from 2020 to 2030, faster than the average for all occupations, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Last year, the FAA reported that about 164,000 Americans held airline transport certificates, down about 1,000 from 2019. Those numbers include pilots not currently working.

Kit Darby, a retired United Airlines pilot, believes the obvious solution for easing future shortages would be to raise the retirement age. Congress raised the retirement age from 60 to 65 in 2007. Last week, Sen. Lindsay Graham, R.-S.C., proposed legislation to raise it to 67.

The FAA requires pilots over 40 to have medical checkups semi-annually to maintain certifications. "There's no good medical reason not to fly if you can certify," Darby said.

Congress could also consider reducing the 1,500-hour training requirement, which was put in place after a 2009 crash of a regional jet. Pilots who've been in the military or who received aviation education already have exceptions to the requirement.

Delta earlier this year joined other airlines by dropping a requirement that pilots hold a bachelor's degree. That move is drawing some people to flight training schools.

"People are looking at the field thinking, 'I don't need a four-year degree,'" said Trever Rossini, owner of Inflight Pilot Training in Eden Prairie where the cost to get a commercial license is around $70,000.

Even so, a record number of students applied to the University of North Dakota's John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences. A class of 500 students will start this fall and pay $72,000 for flight training on top of the regular costs for a four-year bachelor's degree.

"We had to stop enrollment in January because we only have so much airspace, so many aircraft and so many instructors," said Elizabeth Bjerke, associate dean and professor of aviation at UND.

Sophia Jensen, a recent graduate from the school, is nearing 1,000 flight hours by working as a trainer. She's also interviewing to join a regional carrier where she'll continue her training next year in Delta's Propel pilot career path program.

Jensen's already been recruited by a Delta competitor and heard about airlines scouting at UND. "They're knocking on our doors because they're so desperate for pilots," she said.

At Flying Cloud Airport in Eden Prairie on a recent afternoon, Berk continued working on getting his 1,500 hours as he instructed student Jeetan Karki, 26, of Richfield, who also hopes to work for an airline someday.

Berk guided Karki through a Cessna 172 flight display and a checklist of procedures. It was the student's first flight on the Cessna 172.

"I like to say it's like when you're driving someone else's car and looking for the windshield wipers but worse," Berk said.

Berk led Karki around the exterior of the plane, checking the wings and underside. Then, the two got into the plane, lined up for takeoff and flew for an hour.

These hours of flight instruction are helping Berk near his goal as he begins interviewing for jobs at regional airlines.

He's working 12- to 14-hour days, but says he doesn't feel depleted by it. "Now, I come out of it feeling good and that's something I've never felt before," he said.