A survey has come out that finally puts into numbers the level of the pain that the commercial airline pilot community faces. The number of pilots who are now unemployed, following the pandemic is staggering.
The study was conducted by GOOSE, a pilot recruitment firm along with publisher FlightGlobal, and it found that nearly half of all pilots worldwide are either looking for work or furloughed. The poll found that 30% of those surveyed said they were out of work and looking, with another 17% saying they were furloughed and awaiting further news. In addition, six percent said that they were still employed with their airline, but they were now doing non-flying work. So more than half of pilots lost their flying job as a result of the pandemic.
Of those who are looking, GOOSE says, 80% said that they’d accept a cut in pay for a new job.
FlightGlobal recruitment sales manager Katie Mann said, “It is simply a shocking reality of the state of the aviation industry that more than half of the world’s pilots are not employed as pilots and flying as they have trained to do so.” She went on to say that their research found that many pilots who are still employed worry about their job, with many of them actively looking at other industries as a backstop.
