Hamburg - Worldwide demand for aircraft pilots is at a record level, with 17,000 new pilots required every year, a German trade magazine, Aero International, said Tuesday. It based the figure on hirings and quoted a study by US planemaker Boeing predicting the number of airliners in use around the world would double from 18,230 last year to 36,420 in 2026.
To fly them all, 363,000 people would have to train as pilots in the next two decades, the Boeing study indicated.
The current shortage is prompting rapidly expanding Asian and Middle Eastern airlines to headhunt pilots from small Western airlines which cannot match the big airlines' pay and special bonuses.
Erhard Walther, chief executive of a Hamburg, Germany pilot recruitment company, Hamburger Interpersonal, forecast a slight easing in demand from 2009.
He said demand was currently so high that flying schools could not hire enough teachers, because staff were being poached to work behind the joystick.
"It's not just in the Gulf that the industry is growing fast, but in Asia too, particularly India. The Indian carriers pay very high salaries."
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has called for fundamental reforms to the way pilots are trained.
Aero International said the poaching was killing off small airlines offering provincial feeder services.
Since the poached pilots were being moved from small craft to big jets, there was also a safety risk. Air crashes last year in Indonesia had been blamed on skimpy pilot training, Aero International said.
"The job market for pilots at the moment is like the Wild West," Lufthansa chief of operations Juergen Raps was quoted as saying. "It's not surprising that recruiters will stop at nothing when demand for talent is so great."
