India's cockpit crisis
India’s fast-growing airline industry is plagued by decaying infrastructure, frequent delays, and financial losses. Now add one more problem: a pilot shortage.
The industry’s dozen or so carriers, many less than five years old, are scouring the globe in search of qualified captains and are struggling to train Indian pilots. “Ever since the hiring boom here, students are running wherever they can to get qualified,” says John Ekl, chief pilot of SpiceJet, a two-year-old carrier patterned after Southwest Airlines (Charts, Fortune 500), the U.S. no-frills company where Ekl used to work.
Going abroad to find pilots is a relatively new phenomenon. When the scramble began two years ago, airlines would just poach each other’s staff. Pilots would land their planes, taxi to the gate, and walk down the tarmac to begin a new job at a better-paying airline, leaving passengers stranded and airline managers in a panic. The practice continued until the beginning of this year, when major Indian carriers agreed to a no-poaching pact.
Experienced captains can make between $120,000 and $156,000 a year with overtime, five times what they took home ten years ago, when Indian pilots were among the worst paid in the world. And the demand isn’t expected to slow anytime soon. Indian carriers have 425 aircraft on order and by 2020 will need an estimated 10,000 pilots, says Kapil Kaul, a consultant in New Delhi with the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation. There are now about 3,000 pilots in India, 600 of them foreigners.
Several Indian airlines are sending promising cadets to training courses in the U.S. One of them, Kingfisher, has linked with flight schools in California and Arizona to offer a nine-month training course for $45,000. Those who graduate and pass the medical and written tests will be hired by Kingfisher and refunded about $12,400. The first batch of 70 will graduate in February.
Other carriers have similar programs. But most experts say another four or five years will pass before the large percentage of foreign pilots can be trimmed and Indian captains are able to take over. In the meantime, SpiceJet’s Ekl tells his fellow expat pilots, “Enjoy it while it lasts.”
30/10/07 Daniel Pepper/Fortune/CNNMoney.com