Written by Mark Dixon
Over the years, plenty of young people have walked into our hangar at Boorowa. Each one holds a printout about the global pilot shortage. So they arrive believing the world needs hundreds of thousands of new pilots. Naturally, they treat a commercial licence as a golden ticket. Then they ask how fast they can get one.
Here is what I tell them. Usually it is not what they came to hear.
Australia does not have a shortage of pilots. Australia has a shortage of experienced pilots. Still, those two problems get mixed up constantly. And mixing them up will cost you years and a great deal of money.
The gap sits between 200 and 500 hours
Ring any regional operator and ask what they are short of. They will say captains. Then they will say instructors. After that, they will mention people willing to live in Kununurra or Mount Isa. But nobody will say they are desperate for fresh 200-hour pilots. After all, those arrive every week with a folder of certificates and nothing behind them.
The industry says this out loud when you go looking. One Australian training resource puts it plainly. There is a serious shortage of captains and instructors. Meanwhile, there is no shortage of graduates with low hours chasing a first job.
The stall point is easy to locate. It sits between finishing your CPL and reaching the hours an operator wants. Roughly 200 to 500 hours of flying fills that gap. And nobody hands it to you. Crossing it is the real job. Everything before it is paperwork with an aeroplane attached.
So how do people cross it? Mostly they instruct, or they go bush. Some end up mustering in the Territory. Others fly charter out of a strip nobody has heard of. Two years later, they hold the command time an airline wants. In short, the boring answer is the one that works.
Which is why I get uneasy watching someone borrow six figures. Often the whole plan rests on a forecast written by an aircraft manufacturer. Those forecasts are not lies. Still, they describe a global market over twenty years. Meanwhile, the charter operator at Wagga wants 500 hours of command time before he opens your logbook.
Do the cheap test first
Here is the advice that saves the most money. And it costs almost nothing.
Sit your Class 1 medical before you spend a dollar on training.
Over the years, I have watched people put twenty thousand into flying first. Then a cardiac screen or a colour vision test ends the professional plan. Meanwhile, booking a DAME takes an afternoon. So skipping it can waste a year.
The same logic runs through the money side. Training to a commercial licence pushes past a hundred thousand dollars once the ratings go in. Still, the fine print matters more than the headline. VET Student Loans generally attach to the diploma component only. So your private licence hours come out of your own pocket. Schools also leave flight tests off the quoted figure. Budget for the examiner, the aircraft hire, and the wait to get both.
While we are on due diligence, look hard at the school itself. Soar Aviation collapsed at the end of 2020. Students lost money and loan entitlement. So ask about CASA approvals, instructor turnover, and Part 141 versus Part 142 before you transfer anything.
The jobs nobody puts on the poster
Now for the part I enjoy.
Everyone arrives wanting the same seat at the same airline. Meanwhile, some of the best flying careers sit quietly in the background. Most are short of people and paying properly.
Agricultural flying is one of them. It demands low-level precision and constant judgement. Yet the sector is chronically short of pilots, and the average sits around $134,600. Then there is aerial firefighting. But the old habit of chasing the northern hemisphere season is breaking down. Fire seasons now stretch and overlap.
Instructing deserves a mention too. Students treat it as a stepping stone. Yet nothing sharpens your airmanship like explaining it at 2,000 feet. And Grade 1 instructors now earn serious money. So plenty of them never leave.
Then there is the pathway that pays you to train. Airservices Australia covers air traffic control training and pays a salary while you learn. Now compare that with borrowing a hundred grand. Licensed aircraft maintenance engineers tell a similar story. After all, the workforce is ageing and the shortage looks more structural than the pilot one.
Meanwhile, the sector feeding all of this keeps getting squeezed. The Australian Federation of Air Pilots has warned about the decline in general aviation. In short, a weaker sector means more reliance on overseas-trained pilots. And fewer small operators means fewer of the jobs that turn a graduate into a captain.
What I say to the printout
Come and fly. But get the medical first. Then choose your route with your eyes open. After all, the licence is the easy part. The hours are the hard part.
So the shortage is real. It just does not sit where the brochure says it does.
Author Bio:
Mark Dixon runs Fly Oz, a flight training operation based at Boorowa in regional New South Wales.
