Global air traffic keeps on rising, and with it the need for more planes and pilots—but pilots can't just be ordered and bought like planes.
Increasingly, airlines are competing for the pilots' attention, and while pay has been rising—one Ryanair captain reports that Chinese airlines are offering "salaries that are a bit insane"—the pay is not the only factor in winning pilots.
The head of the French pilots' union SNPL told media that while "all airlines are hiring and in particular traditional airlines ... and as these firms offer better work conditions than those at Ryanair, so when pilots have the choice they'll go where there is the better offer." The Ryanair captain quoted above, for instance, turned down a salary of over €300,000 to got with Air France for a better work-life balance.
The cockpit crisis doesn't just involve individual airlines such as Ryanair, which had to cancel large chunks of schedule because of pilot shortages. At bottom, there's also a demographic issue: More and more people are traveling, and the baby boom generation of pilots, many of them trained originally by the military, are retiring in droves.
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