The demand for pilots in the next 10 years remains strong, despite the hits the aviation industry has taken during the COVID-19 pandemic.
That’s the word from CAE, which just released its 2020-2029 CAE Pilot Demand Outlook, which offers “key insights on the future need for professional pilots in both commercial and business aviation, building on the markets’ key drivers, variables, and trends.”
For the third year of the outlook, CAE officials said they investigated market data as airlines and other companies that hire pilots are “navigating the current downturn in passenger air travel and are pursuing recovery strategies following the outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic.”
“While the demand for pilots has decreased significantly during 2020, CAE’s analysis shows that the active pilot population is expected to return to 2019 levels in 2022,” officials said in the report.
According to the 2020-2029 CAE Pilot Demand Outlook, retirement and attrition are expected to continue to be a challenge for the civil aviation industry as air travel recovers progressively.
“This is expected to drive an acute demand for pilots, resulting in an estimated short-term need for approximately 27,000 new professional pilots starting in late 2021,” CAE officials said.
The report shows that, despite the short-term decline in the number of active pilots due to the impact of COVID-19, the civil aviation industry is expected to require more than 260,000 new pilots over the next decade.

CAE’s analysis shows that the fundamental factors influencing pilot demand prior to the COVID-19 outbreak remain unchanged. Age-based retirement and fleet growth were, and are expected to remain, the main drivers of pilot demand, officials noted.
“With the 2020-2029 CAE Pilot Demand Outlook, we hope to arm the industry with the insights that will help the global aviation community understand, rethink, and learn about how to continue to build and grow the supply of highly qualified pilots as the industry emerges from the downturn,” said Nick Leontidis, CAE Group President, Civil Aviation Training Solutions. “Disruptive events are opportunities to innovate and collaborate.”
I can’t give this a big enough eye roll.
Gee, a training institute forecasting huge future needs for trained pilots; what a surprise. Never appearing in these forecast press releases is, for example, a comparison of their 2009 forecast with what actually happened in 2010-2019.
Think you are correct. Quite possibly the training industries need for pilots to train remains high. Not the industries they are implying the pilots will go to after training. CAE needs all those pilots. Their needs are limitless.