Airlines In The Brace Position

The first European trainees earned multipilot licenses in Denmark in September, and took jobs with Scandinavian budget carrier Sterling Airlines; more recently six Chinese cadets from two airlines have finished programs at home. But pilots unions have criticized the new multi-pilot-licenses system for turning out first officers that haven't flown enough. At an industry conference in August, Prater, the ALPA boss, said that the days of greenhorn trainees working for "burger-flipper wages" are over. And he warned that airlines have become too eager to fill cockpits with inexperienced crews. "At some express carriers, pilots now need as few as 250 hours of fight time [the very minimum hours required to obtain a commercial pilot license] to land a job [as a copilot] of a fast-moving, demanding jet. Unlike in the 1960s, when new pilots entering the system came to work as flight engineers and had time to observe and learn how crews got along and how the system works, new pilots today are going straight into the right [copilot] seat, and moving into the left [captain] seat in a hurry. And they're doing it in airplanes that are great machines, but can be unforgiving."

The problem is particularly acute in the developing world. Take Indonesia. Since 2000, its yearly passenger count has tripled to 30 million and the number of airlines has leaped from five to 25. By 2010, the government expects that the number of trips per year could more than double again. The country has suffered more than its share of fatal accidents, including two for upstart budget carrier Lion Air and a March 2007 crash of a Garuda Indonesia flight trying to land at Yogyakarta—which an official inquiry attributed to a series of errors made by a veteran captain and his rookie copilot. Twenty-one passengers aboard, five of them Australians, perished. "The aviation industry wants to see Indonesia succeed in this struggle [to improve safety]," says William Voss, head of the U.S.-based Flight Safety Foundation during a July summit on air safety held on the resort island Bali, at the same time warning that the "dramatic increase in traffic could lead to even more lives lost."

Certainly there's no end in sight to the transport boom. At the Dubai Airshow in November, Emirates Airline ordered a staggering 81 Airbuses (11 of them double-decker A380s) and 12 Boeing 777s, spending a total of $23 billion. Together, the two main airframe makers are expected to sell a record 2,100 planes worldwide by the time the 2007 books are closed. And pilot pay keeps rising. After a two-year negotiation, Hong Kong's Dragonair offered its pilots a 20 percent raise in mid-December, affirming that pilots are in the driver's seat.

With Antonio Oliveira E. Silva in Paris And Marites Vitug in Manila

© 2007