Retirements, high training costs and poor pay are fuelling a pilot shortage in Canada, industry analysts say, at a time when travel has surged in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
"There's ... not enough people starting up at the bottom of the scale to get people interested in flying," John Gradek, a lecturer in aviation management at McGill University in Montreal, told CTV's Your Morning on Monday.
"They laid off thousands of pilots across the industry and now, with the start of a number of new carriers in the Canadian marketplace and growth of existing carriers, guess what we're short and it's going to be a tough summer to try to find pilots in Canada." But even calling the situation a pilot shortage is oversimplifying a complicated issue, Tim Perry, president of the Canadian division of the Air Line Pilots Association, told CTV News Channel in January.