While that does sound plausible, I would put my money on an actual airline industry shortage. To get a pilot’s license, you have two options; go and fly for the military, or pay for training.
Training cost 100,000 grand here in the US. So you’ll have to find someone who is willing to fly the damn thing, and then is willing to pay for it. Or, serve in the military for about eight years.
I’ve done aviation work before, and I hated it. Constantly exposed all these strange chemicals, plus the stress of being responsible for any engine malfunctions, and the consequences of said malfunctions.
No thanks. Sure, the money’s good, but the industry’s gonna have some trouble with recruiting, just like ever other trade out there.
I was going to say something similar.
I've worked professional engineering level jobs for some of the big oilfield service companies, and being that they're the biggest (or like the big 3/4 finance firms) are cognizant enough to realize that they need to have and help stock a pipeline of engineers or accountants or whatever. You get a degree, but then it's probably 6 months until you know what's going on enough that you can even tread water, and a year or two until you're actually producing any reasonable profit for the firm. But without that pipeline, you'll eventually be dead.
Now, I was (am) also a private pilot and was in Air Force Reserves for a while. This was 20+ years ago, but many friends either went reg force, or tried to make a go of the pilot thing.
The military understood the above, and hence would spend a million + dollars training a pilot over a few years. In exchange they wanted 7 years service promise, but I hear that varies with the market. That was the big reason I did not go into it. 5 years of school, 2-3 years training, and 7 years of service. At 18 I wasn't ready to commit to almost another half of my life. As we've seen what's happened to the military over the last 10 years, my friends still in say it's a bit of a mess. Even more glamorous roles like pilot of stretched thin, overworked, and have to deal with the DEI stuff.
Others went private route. 200 hours in a plane for your basic multi/IFR commercial license. A Cessna at the time was $150/hr, multi engine twin more than double that. All in my friend said it was over 50k. More than double that if you want to get a chopper license. And probably more than double that now since this as I said was early 2000s.
That's where the fun begins. You'll likely start by teaching. Getting like $20/hr for every hour you're actually in the air. Slowly build time, maybe get on with a tier 3 regional line flying cargo to middle of nowhere northern Quebec. You need to be flexible above all else to get hours. Once you have 1500 hours (equivalent to like the price of a house in air time) you can start applying for better jobs. The pay is better, but still not great. The problem with these sorts of "prestigious" jobs is that in effect can be part of your pay. Since lots of people want to do it, they can pay peanuts.
At the same time, all airlines were in a race to the bottom. They need cheap airfares, and you don't do that with lots of free training and investment in future pilots. With staffing levels worse, it's easier to get on, but my friend who recently hit 1500 hours and got on with a regional airline here as a first officer, and she had to pay the company like $10k for a checkout ride on a dash 8 and simulated heart attack of Captain on take off.
Anyways, all this is just a symptom of the problems obvious from the rest of the thread. Be it your car or a society, you can but off doing necessary but unpleasant tasks like changing oil, maintaining, bridges, training the next generation for a while. Then push it again. And again. But eventually it catches up to you, and to fix the problem now will be cumulatively twice as difficult and expensive as it would have been had you been doing what you should have along the way.
To that end, now there exists such a thing as pilot mills. For the low low price of indentured servitude, Chinese, middle eastern airlines etc will essentially speed people along a track to get their commercial license with the bare minimum of time and training allowed by law. Similar to how they'll take some poor Bangladeshi's passport making him build a skyscraper in Dubai as a veritable slave, this seems to be the slightly higher tier version of that for people who know English and can read a map.
