Airline sector crisis: Thousands of pilots lost their jobs during the pandemic, and their ranks haven’t been replenished

In the labour-force wreckage wreaked by the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada’s commercial airline pilots stand out as an anomaly. No other group of white-collar workers with their level of training, skill and pay levels was let go in other sectors of the economy over the past two years as the country was reshaped by infection and uncertainty. Not in banking, not in education and not in government. Pilots making six-figure salaries and operating some of the world’s most sophisticated flying machines joined coffee baristas, hotel cleaners and hairdressers in the ranks of the unemployed – all workers in industries hardest hit by the health crisis. Thousands of pilots lost their jobs. They are the casualties of an airline sector that stopped almost overnight and a government that experts say lacked the leadership and foresight to properly plot its restart. The fallout of that failure is clear. And it stretches from the baggage carousel to the cockpit. Demand for air travel is back with unexpected force this year, but the supply of pilots isn’t there to match for a number of reasons. Many are still coming back up to speed in training after months away. Others have left Canada or the industry entirely for more predictable jobs. Airlines are scrambling daily to find the pilots to fly planes, sometimes just hours before scheduled takeoff. Delays on the ground at airports and changes to federal rules governing pilot flight hours have compounded the problem. “It’s like if we had a snowstorm every day for the past four months,” said Louis-Éric Mongrain, a pilot with Air Transat who comments regularly on the industry in the media. Airline crew schedulers, the men and women whose job it is to find pilots and flight attendants to staff a flight, are “going nuts” dealing with irregular operations, he said.<br/>