Glenn's path worked, he was paid for his flying time and earned enough time to qualify for an airline.  Check out Skywest's Job Facebook Here.  Be sure to call us at (619) 449-0611 to schedule an intro flight.  Once you earn your pilot's license you can teach others how to fly, be paid while getting the flight hours you need.  All airline pilots follow two paths they can either be retired military pilots, Certified Flying Instructors (CFI's), some try to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars at aviation schools but the best type of aviation is flying and being paid to do so.

Data: Federal Aviation Administration; Chart: Lazaro Gamio/Axios


​What's happening: The U.S. pilot shortage has threatened to eventually shut down smaller regional and cargo airlines and make rural areas of the U.S. more isolated and out of reach. But since 2006 — when millennials began reaching adulthood — the number of 20- to 35-year-old pilots has been slowly ticking back up after decades of decline, and compensating for a fall in other age categories, according to FAA data.
In 2008, 150,907 people in the 20- to 34-year-old age group had active pilot certificates. By last year, the number was up to 197,493, according to the FAA.

But there's still a long way to go:

• There are 177,000 fewer pilots today than in 1980. Fewer than a third are 20-34 years old, whereas this age group made up almost half of pilots in 1980.
• A fifth of certified U.S. commercial pilots are over 50. Mandatory retirement age is 65.
• And the usual main font of pilots — the military — is turning out far fewer than it used to. Moreover, millennials are significantly less likely to be veterans than past generations, according to Pew Research Center.
  
  

Major airlines — such as American Airlines, Delta, Southwest and United, which account for 67.5% of industry revenue — have been better able to attract young pilots with wage, benefits and recruitment strategies, such as Delta's Propel program.

• But smaller regional and cargo airlines are struggling to fill their cockpits, experts tell Axios — even though they are paying a starting salary of $60,000, up from around $20,000 in 2012.
  
  

The big picture: The industry expects the number of air travelers to double over the next two decades, and cargo companies could be forced to find new ways to fulfill growing demand without access to more pilots.

How we got here: Following 9/11, several airlines went out of business or filed for bankruptcy. The industry then suffered through the financial crash. That made piloting a hard sell for young people starting careers.

But there are other hard obstacles:

• Price: If you aren't a veteran, you need training courses that cost tens of thousands of dollars, which, on top of already-rising costs for college, make it unattainable for many young people. The FAA has also increased requirements.
• Diversity: The millennial and post-millennial generations are the most diverse the U.S. has ever seen — about half of post-millennials are nonwhite. Yet airlines are largely not tapping nonwhite and women millennials. Look at the data — 92% of pilots and flight engineers are men, according to Census data collected by Data USA. And 93% are white. "We're only set up to recruit from half the population — males," says James Higgins, director of the aviation program at the University of North Dakota.
• Civic virtue: Aviation may be missing millennials who seek an altruistic occupation. "They may go into medicine, they may go into Peace Corps, they may go into other things that in their mind would be more impactful. I think we've lost a little bit of people coming into aviation because of that," Higgins said.
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The power of image: Sandy Napier, a former Navy aviator who spent several decades as a pilot for a major airline, said that when he was young, planes were the new technology and films often glorified flying and wartime in ways they don't anymore.

• "If you walked down a terminal, through the concourse, and you had your uniform on," Napier, a Baby Boomer, said remembering when he became a pilot, "if they see four stripes, generally people knew that was significant of being a captain." But the prestige has diminished some, he said.

Source

California’s long and deadly wildfire season is wearing down its firefighting pilots and causing Cal Fire to ground as many as six aircraft at a time because of staffing shortages.  Schedules obtained by The Sacramento Bee show a rising number of grounded aircraft as the summer fire season progressed because pilots were unavailable to fly the planes. The shortage is particularly acute among low-flying S-2T tanker pilots. An average of four of the state’s 23 tankers have been grounded on certain days in August because they lacked pilots.

It left a critical firefighting component — a rapid response team to attack fires soon after they ignite — significantly understaffed as California battled its worst wildfires this season.

Cal Fire leaders say they cannot remember having so many aircraft grounded during peak fire months because of staffing shortages. They can call on private companies and federal aircraft to fill in during an emergency, but they acknowledge that the department’s pilot shortfall is straining the fleet.

“We are doing our best to consider the mission of the department in this as well as the needs of our pilots,” said Cal Fire Chief of Flight Operations Dennis Brown.

His plans have been hampered by intense July fires that kept pilots working nonstop, retirements, long-term medical absences, private companies poaching their experienced pilots, an unexpected death and a cluster of job candidates who opted not to become tanker pilots after completing training, he said. Within the last year they lost 10 air tanker pilots to those issues.

“They would have had to have a crystal ball to predict this,” said Jim Barnes, a longtime tanker pilot who recently retired.

Several current and former firefighting pilots in California declined to be interviewed on the record for this story, citing Cal Fire’s ability to take away their authorization to fly tankers.

The staffing issue is going to take a while to address. In order to cover current shortfalls, fix the daunting schedule Brown admits is having adverse effects on their pilots and staff new planes coming in, Brown estimates they’ll need about 40 more pilots in the next few years. Eight people are currently in training to become air tanker pilots, but Brown said historically less than half of trainees actually decide to become air tanker pilots with Cal Fire.

“The training is much more vigorous than it used to be, but that’s a good thing,” Barnes said. “They’ve come forward light years on that issue.”

Meanwhile, Cal Fire is preparing to reconfigure its fleet to reflect the realities of the state’s recent year-round fire seasons.

Today, it mostly flies aircraft built in the 1970s and ‘80s, and its schedules are built on what officials now say is an outdated assumption that firefighters will get a few months of rest every winter.

“We used to have winter maintenance. There is no more winter maintenance,” Brown said. As a result, the state is adding new Blackhawk helicopters at a cost of $24 million apiece and taking on seven retrofitted Air Force C-130 planes as new tankers. Each of the new aircraft represents millions of dollars in investment — and the need for more and more pilots.

The department is rethinking a demanding schedule that has pilots working six days on before getting a day off. That schedule used to make sense when a pilot could take off on a beach vacation for around half the year, but Cal Fire can’t make that promise anymore.

“To stay competitive and also as a matter of safety, we can’t work these people year-round at these rates,” Brown said.

Cal Fire and DynCorp, the private company that flies and maintains the state’s firefighting airplanes, are now struggling to fill just three slots for tanker pilots that would let them keep all of the state’s S-2T tankers up and running.

In many cases, they’ll be competing with private companies that offer better pay and friendlier schedules.

“It’s really hard to find specialized pilots to do the kind of work Cal Fire does,” said Ed Hrivnak, a firefighter and search-and-rescue pilot in Washington state.

He said virtually every level of government is trying to recruit pilots because they’re experiencing waves of Baby Boomer retirements. That means intense competition for qualified pilots. “I get unsolicited job offers,” Hrivnak said.

The S-2T tankers with the most pronounced staffing challenges are part of a layered fleet of aircraft that can rapidly respond to fires throughout the West. Cal Fire manages the fixed-wing fleet, but the aircraft are flown and maintained by employees of contractor DynCorp. The company gets about $60 million a year for its work with the state fire department.

Barnes, the recently retired pilot, said S-2Ts are critically important. They represent a rapid response team that is called when fires are still in the beginning stages – before they grow to wildfire status and become much more difficult and costly to contain.

“Not having these planes fully staffed is a significant limitation,” Barnes said. “The opportunity to contain a new fire is not long, so if you don’t have that capability it’s a big hole in the program.”

This year, anticipating a staffing shortfall, Cal Fire hired companies to fly three large tankers through November. They are on call and can’t leave the state for the duration of the contract.

Cal Fire can call on federal resources, such as the National Guard, and it can hire private aircraft in emergencies to dump water or retardant on wildfires.

Cal Fire also has a dozen UH-1 Huey helicopters flown by state firefighters. The pilots “are working crazy overtime, like everyone else,” said Tim Edwards, their union rank-and-file director.

Some of the department’s staffing challenges this season were years in the making. It knew that some of its pilots were planning to retire, for instance, and increased training seats in recent fire seasons. Last year was also the first year Cal Fire didn’t have a reserve pilot to cover when other pilots were sick or took off for an emergency, a taste of the staffing problems to come this year.

“This isn’t as much a money issue as it is a qualified pilot issue,” Brown said. “If all trainees had gone through and been successful, I know we wouldn’t be where we’re at right now,” he added.

Art Trask, a retired DynCorps Cal Fire program manager, said he was worried that the six-day pilot schedule was too much to ask during California’s year-round firefighting seasons.

“I’m more concerned about next year and the year after and the year after,” he said. “I’m hearing people are tired.”

The first step to becoming a firefighting pilot is to get your Private Pilot license to fly.  From there you can build hours and qualifications to fly at night and with multi-engine planes.