This week, with the worst of the winter storm behind us, some flights remain canceled or delayed at Piedmont Triad International Airport. With snow, sleet, and freezing rain over the weekend, it would be understandable to blame delays on the weather conditions at the airport.
But runways at PTI weren't necessarily the issue. Airline operators — afraid of having their aircraft locked at airports where they would be snowed in — canceled flights to eventually restart operations more efficiently. Clearing up the backlog can take several days. One reason is pilot shortages.
Patrick Arnzen is the CEO of Thrust Flight, an airline-style flight academy based in Texas.
"You know, we have a problem with not having enough simulators," he says. "We have a problem with not having enough folks to train those people. So, we really have this perfect storm where we simply just don’t have enough crew —especially captain crew — at both the regional airlines and the major airlines."
A Boeing research study points to the need for more than 600,000 new pilots and 700,000 maintenance technicians over the next two decades.