Republic announced earlier this year that they intend to hire 400 pilots in 2012, and that was before they accepted delivery of twenty-eight De Havilland Dash-8 Q400s from the soon to be defunct Colgan Airways. Republic Airways will be flying a total of 32 Q400s under the United Express banner after reaching an agreement with United which lasts 8 years.

Airline industry trade group Airlines for America’s annual summer forecast predicts that U.S. airlines will carry 206.2 million passengers in the June-August peak flying season, just 5 percent below the record of 217.6 million. A record number of passengers will fly internationally this summer, and the total of travelers is expected to reach 26.8 million, beating last summer’s record of 26.3 million.

According to Airlines for America’s President and CEO Nicolas E. Calio, customers are benefiting from record airline operational performance and greater access to the global economy while fares continue to trail the price of other services.

Delta Air Lines, for example, reported strong financial and operating performance for April 2012. Delta’s passenger revenue increased 11 percent for the month of April as compared to the same time period last year. The airline witnessed strong revenue improvement across all departments by tightly controlling the number of its airline seats available, the number of future airline passengers already booked, and benefits from investments in products and services.

The internet has information about the interview experience at every airline that you may be interested in flying for. It is fairly easy to find out what will be required of you during the interview and to be prepared for it. If you look at the interviews at several airlines you will see that they all share the basic parts of an interview.

Before You Arrive for the Interview

Spend some time collecting and packaging all of the information that the airline will tell you that they need to see, such as your driving record and school transcripts. There will also be a few forms for you to fill out. You should make sure that there are no mistakes or typos in these documents and gather them into a packet that you can present to the recruiters when you meet them. Your appearance needs to be professional and immaculate. Don’t have a suit? Buy one, and have it altered for a good fit. Make sure that your entire look is presentable. I have spoken to many recruiters who say that the need for a professional look should be obvious, but somehow people manage to mess this up routinely.

Written Tests

Once you arrive for the interview, you will be given several written tests that usually consist of a series of questions from one of the various pilot certificates, with the ATP and instrument being the most common. Some airlines include questions from the commercial test bank as well. There will also be a series of IQ tests, psychiatric evaluations and personality tests. A few airlines will test for mechanical aptitude or math skills. Again, research both on the internet and from actually talking to people in the know will help.

The Human Resources Interview

Once the written tests are done you can expect to spend some time being interviewed by recruiters from the airline’s Human Resources Department. Expect questions about your basic background, and especially if there are any gaps in employment or schooling. You can also expect questions about the results of the background check the airline will run on you. The best advice I can give you would be to relax and be yourself. Honesty is the best policy without a doubt. Be honest about any questions or concerns that they have. Candor on your part will go a long way. Be prepared to discuss checkride failures, training hiccups, or anything else that catches their attention. Be mature and accept responsibility for any mistakes, and again be candid.

The Technical Interview

Expect one of the recruiters you will meet to be a pilot who flies for the airline. This pilot will be eager to go over various aeronautical charts to quiz you about how to read and use them. There will also be questions about your experiences in your flying career and questions about the aircraft that are listed in your logbook. Aside from assessing your technical knowledge they will be trying to determine if you are the kind of person that they can spend four days with in a room smaller than a phone booth without regretting the experience. Do you sound confident without sounding cocky? Are you mature? The challenge here is not to sound like your answers are too practiced or unbelievable.

The Sim Ride

Unlike interviews in the past, sim rides are becoming rare, due to the cost of owning and maintaining high-end simulators. A few carriers still have them though so you need to be prepared. If your airline still uses the sim ride to assess your flying skills, the airline will probably provide you with at least some information on the profile you can expect to fly in the sim. The profile will consist of a takeoff, some basic air work, tracking a radial on a VOR, an ILS to a missed approach and a hold. It will all be hand-flown using raw data, and you may or may not have a non-flying pilot available. If paired with a non-flying pilot, use them as a resource and involve them in the flight.

As both the Regional Airlines and the Major Airlines begin to ramp up hiring, it will become very competitive as pilots try to get the the best jobs. After all of the time and money a pilot spends to become qualified for an airline job, it is important to make the best of the opportunity to fly for the airlines. Be prepared and succeed!

On a recent visit to one such website I noticed a lot of discussion about the Airline Industry as usual, but I also noticed increasing amount of interest in other related jobs that didn’t create a lot of buzz at one time. These jobs can provide good flying opportunities to those with a sense of adventure, and can provide a pilot with valuable experience that can be used to climb the career ladder to flying the bigger aircraft for the airlines.

In cargo operations for example, the two well known carriers are UPS and FedEx. However, in addition there are a lot of smaller freight companies that supply the equivalent of Regional Feed for the larger freight companies by flying smaller aircraft into relatively small airports to bring back valuable overnight airfreight to feed into their delivery systems on a regularly scheduled basis.

There are also companies that provide on-demand services to the large freight operations. These on-demand companies have are called ACMI companies: Aircraft, Crew, Maintenance, and Insurance companies. In short, they are charter outfits of the cargo world, and they fly everything from single engine Cessna Caravans to Boeing 747s. In simple terms, they usually operate on an on-call basis to provide feed for UPS, FedEx, DHL/Airborne Express, or for other types of companies around the world that need to lease an airplane and a crew.

But whether you find yourself flying 747s across the ocean in the middle of the night, dodging thunderstorms in a Caravan, or landing on dirt strips in Africa or Alaska, you can find yourself learning lessons that will serve you well as an airline pilot.

The route that leads you to the cockpit of a modern airliner can be a circuitous route to be sure. I speak with airline recruiters almost daily in the course of doing my job for ATP. I hear from them many times about the number of pilots who have impressed them not with a logbook full of jet time, but with the spirit of adventure and the pure love of aviation that it takes to fly in very challenging environments.

Pilots whose love of flying leads them down different roads to get where they want to go can find a lot of useful experience in their log books if they vigorously pursue their career goals to fly for the airlines no matter where it takes them.

Flight time and duty time limitations for airline pilots are laid out in Part 121 of the Federal Aviation Regulations. The FAA flight time limitations for commercial pilots are as follows:

• 8 hours between required rest periods.
• 30 hours in any 7 consecutive days.
• 100 hour in any calendar month.
• 1000 hours in a calendar year.

8 hours between required rest periods is the hardest of the limitations to understand. The required rest can change depending on how many hours are actually flown in a 24 hour period. By regulation, a pilot can only be SCHEDULED to fly 8 hours in any 24 consecutive hours. Now, if because of delays beyond the Airline’s control, the 8 hours are exceeded, the pilot can complete the flying assignment, but they will need additional rest before another assignment is accepted. The FAA rest requirements are as follows:

• Scheduled for less than 8 hours = 9 hours of consecutive rest.
• If you end up flying more than 8 hours but less than 9 hours = 10 consecutive hours of rest.
• If you end up flying more than 9 hours = 11 hours of consecutive rest.

The 8 hour limitation is not often exceeded, but is does happen due to a variety of problems that may be encountered by an airline crew.

For airline pilots, there are two different types of times we must be cognizant of each day. One is the flight time the FAA requires us to keep track of for the limits discussed above. We call this actual flight time Block Time, and it is what we record in our logbooks. The other figure we should be conscious of is what we call Pay Credit, which is the amount of time that we will be paid for. Pay Credit is often more than the actual flight time for several reasons (and usually has to do with a Pilot’s union contract) and is what our pay is based upon.

The last “Time” that we must keep close track of is Duty Time. Duty time is the period between the time we check in at the airport to work, and the time which we check out for the day. The FAA allows us to be on duty for a maximum of 16 hours. The difference between a normal job and flying for the airlines is that a pilot may be scheduled to receive 8 hours of Pay Credit in a day, but it may occasionally take us 16 hours of Duty Time to get it if you include the time we are waiting at the airport between flights.

Keeping track of the different categories of “Time” is an important task for airline pilots because we need to stay in compliance with the FAA’s limitations while we make sure that we are paid correctly. It is quite different from the challenges of punching a time clock, but it can be easily mastered once you do it for a while.

As with most international trips, our flight from Newark, NJ (EWR) to Amsterdam, Netherlands (AMS) started in the evening around six pm. As it was a trans-oceanic trip, we met in the weather room two hours prior to departure time. We had an additional pilot on the trip because the flight time from EWR to AMS exceeded eight hours. Our preflight planning consisted of drawing out our route on the oceanic charts, checking the weather reports en route, at our destination and alternate. We also checked our domestic and ICAO flight plans, and our fuel requirements. One hour and thirty minutes prior to the flight, we left the weather room and
headed for the airplane.

Our additional pilot, known as the International Relief Officer (IRO) headed outside to perform an exterior inspection of the aircraft. While he was doing that, the captain and I worked on readying the airplane for our flight. We loaded all of our information in the Flight Management Computer (FMC) and checked it against the printed flight plan. One of the most important things that we do is to verify that our clearance from Air Traffic Control matches exactly with what we have programmed into the FMC. It generally takes less time to prepare the cockpit than it does for passengers to board, so we were able to take a breather for a few minutes before we blocked out (departed).

When we taxied out, all three of us were in the cockpit. After takeoff, the IRO worked out our time estimates for various point along our route and split up the flight time so that we all got a break of equal length. At the top of the climb to our cruising altitude the IRO headed into the back of the aircraft to begin his break. While he was sleeping, we flew up the east coast of Canada. Ninety minutes before reaching oceanic airspace, we requested oceanic clearance from Gander Center. It generally takes several minutes for them to process the request and return clearance via our FMC. When the clearance arrived, it came in the form of a formal text message from Gander Center. We reviewed the clearance and then sent a response back to Gander accepting it.

Just prior to entering Oceanic airspace, ATC terminated radar control and we reverted to reporting our position via our FMC or High Frequency (HF) radios. HF radios are similar to AM radios in that their range is quite long. They are also similar to AM in that the quality of the reception can be poor: it takes a well tuned ear to be able to discern and understand the controllers some nights.

For the next several hours we were basically on our own out over the Atlantic. We made position reports every ten degrees of longitude, roughly every sixty minutes. After a two hour break, the IRO came back to the cockpit and I headed out for my break. We generally have a seat in first class but sometimes it is a row of seats in coach. This was my time to relax, watch a movie, eat, or sleep, which is what I chose to do that night. After a nice two hour nap, I returned to the front and the captain was able to take his break.

Two hours prior to landing, we “coasted” over the Irish coast and resumed radar contact and direct control with Shannon (Ireland) Center. It seems as though the sun always rises just as we approach Ireland. There is something about the sun coming up over the green hills of the Irish country side that makes me stop and look every time. The last forty five minutes of the flight consisted of preparing for the approach, executing it and landing.

As in most cities in Europe, the ride to the hotel took about thirty minutes. It was a nice hotel, downtown, and in a good area. I went to bed and slept for the next five hours. I woke at noon local time and enjoyed the rest of the day walking around the city, checking out the parks and eating dinner with the captain. By Ten pm I was back in bed for a full night’s sleep. In the morning we woke early and started the process all over again for the flight home.

We started our trip at 6:00 pm on Monday and ended at 11:45 am on Wednesday. The trip was worth sixteen hours of flight time yet I was only away from home for two nights. The specifics of our trip to Amsterdam are typical of all of our flights to Europe. International flying is challenging, but also very fun and rewarding.

New York based JetBlue earned $30 million compared with net income of $3 million in the first quarter of 2011. JetBlue’s revenue rose 19 percent to $1.2 billion.

Passenger traffic increased by 14 percent, mostly because JetBlue is expanding its operations and offering new flights. JetBlue also reported that its flights were fuller, which shows that the demand for flights from passengers is still increasing.

JetBlue is expected to be among many Major Airlines who have announced intentions to hire pilots in 2012 both to replace pilots who will be forced to retire due to reaching the mandatory retirement age of 65 and to cover the growth of their airline operations.

Every single airline in the United States will be competing for new pilots for the same reason as approximately 2200 pilots will be forced to retire in 2013 alone. Airlines which have already begun hiring pilots this year have all faced a shortage of new commercial pilots, and the situation can only get worse as we move further into 2012.

Both of these airlines have benefited from hiring many pilots who have been trained in the RJ Program and we were meeting to discuss how we could get more pilots through the RJ Program and into their training classes.

As we discussed the RJ Program I explained what we do here, as well as how the Program does such a good job of preparing pilots of all skill levels for their first experience in Part 121 Airline training.

I explained for example that the RJ Program has never aspired to teach a pilot every single aspect of the Regional Jet, and that we work on other important aspects of what a pilot can expect during new hire training while leaving some of the finer details to be learned at the airline.

I talked about how we aim to help an RJ Student in three ways. The first is to help the student transition from flying Recip-powered propellered aircraft to operating an aircraft powered by high-bypass Turbofans. This is not difficult really once a pilot get used to the lag time associated with turbine powered aircraft, as opposed to the instant response one can get from a healthy reciprocating internal combustion engine. Simply put, you just have to think ahead of the need for a reduction of power or the need for more thrust and act sooner than you would need to if you were flying a light twin for example.

The second transitional challenge for an RJ Student is learning to operate in the all-glass cockpit as opposed to the standard six pack of gauges that are still common in General Aviation Aircraft. Most pilots are very visual learners, and it is interesting to watch a student exposed to the full-glass for the first time. It is sensory overload for most. In time though the technology can be grasped and one finds that the automation lifts some of the workload off of busy pilots and allows for a much safer operation of a very complex aircraft if managed effectively.

The third challenge, and the most difficult for most students, is the transition from the single-pilot mentality necessary when flying general aviation aircraft to the Crew Concept (CRM) that is vital for the safe operation of modern airliners. It doesn’t take a village to raise the RJ, but it absolutely requires smooth teamwork from the two pilots charged with successfully getting passengers from Point A to point B. It takes work and a lot of practice for students to learn to share the responsibility for the flight with another professional aviator.

We have been teaching pilots who want to fly for the airlines these important lessons for a long time, and we are constantly adjusting what we do to mirror the experience one gets in actual new-hire training at an airline. Our success with the RJ Program is based on a lot more then what I have touched on here, but these are the common challenges facing an RJ student.

Although the entire group met together every day in the main display hall to see exhibits set up by all of the large manufacturers of flight simulators and other training tools, during the bulk of the day we were split into groups to attend presentations from four different dedicated tracks – Air Carrier Pilot Training, Regional Airline Pilot Training, Cabin Crew Training and Maintenance Training. The conference sessions addressed subjects such as:

• New hire issues and personnel supply and demand.
• National and international regulatory change.
• Safety and security.
• New aviation technologies and the impact on training.
• Aviation human factors issues.
• Instructional technologies and techniques.
• Simulation technologies and e-learning.
• Economic and environmental realities.

The subject that was spoken about the most in any of those different presentations was the first one on the above list; the supply (or lack thereof) of new pilots entering the Airline Industry now and the next decade.

The discussions started the same way for the most part. The regional airlines are presently suffering from a shortage of pilots, and the reasons have been discussed in depth on this blog and have even been reported on by the major news outlets. The shortage of pilots has quickly become a problem at all of the regional airlines, and they know it will get worse later this year when the major airlines begin hiring pilots to replace those being forced to retire at age 65 beginning in 2013. The Majors will have no problem finding pilots for now, they will just hire very experienced pilots who now work for the Regionals. That is the event that the Regional Airline Recruiters see coming and they have become very concerned.

One of the solutions advanced by the airline executives from both the major and regional airlines was to begin recruiting pilots early in their flight training careers so that pilots can be monitored and even assisted by the airline as they are passing through flight training.

It so happens that the perfect system to accomplish this is already in place at ATP: PilotPool.com. PilotPool allows airline recruiters to see every pilot who is presently training at ATP to fly commercially as well as those who have completed their training. PilotPool.com will allow recruiters to contact talented students early in their flight training to develop some interest in flying for their respective airline.

I will be writing more about the WATS 2012 experience over the next week or so to write about more issues discussed at WATS that ATP is already addressing and is innovating solutions for.

Several carriers from overseas were also in attendance and their recruiters were kept very busy by the large turnout of pilots. As we have mentioned many times here before, the airline industry is growing globally and the pilot shortage has already reached disastrous proportions overseas so recruiters from Europe, the Middle East, China, India, Asia and the Pacific Rim are all coming to hire commercial pilots from the US. These foreign carriers offer lucrative compensation packages that lure thousands of US pilots overseas, making the pilot shortage here in the US more acute.

The Regional Airlines were also well represented at the job fair, with recruiters greeting long lines of pilots wishing to fly for the regional industry at home in the US. We had a chance to meet with all of these recruiters, some of them long time acquaintances as well as some that are new to their positions, and the request heard from all of them was “we need pilots and we need them now.” ATP’s Regional Jet Program is one that all of these recruiters know and appreciate, and promises were made to deliver as many graduates as we can get though our program and onto PilotPool.com where they can be easily recruited by any of the airlines that frequent that useful resource.

The action was frenetic throughout the day and as the last pilot’s resume was collected, the recruiters gathered to talk about what a successful job fair this had been, as well as share their collective concern about attracting new pilots into their cockpits and exciting and fulfilling airline careers. It was well worth the trip for all who attended.