Plenty of Passengers, but Where Are the_纽约时报——考研题源报刊阅读_免费在线阅读收听下载

Pilots ？
乘客很多，飞行员很少？

DELAYS or cancellations because of bad weather or mechanical problems are exasperating but common occurrences in air travel, but increasingly,passengers aren't making it to their destinations for yet another reason: not enough pilots. The gate agent may not tell you that' s why you're grounded, but a dearth of qualified pilots is disrupting, reducing and even eliminating flights.

In addition to widespread delays and cancellations, at least 29 communities, from Modesto, Calif., to Macon, have lost air service since 2013, and hundreds more had their number of fights reduced. Meanwhile, airports that have't lost service complain they can't get additional flights to keep up with local economic development.

So what's causing the shortage? To start, there are just a lot more passengers. According to the Department of Transportation, airlines carried a record 895.5 million passengers in the United States in 2015, up 5 percent from the previous year. To meet global growth over the next 18 years, Boeing forecasts that the industry will need more than a half million new pilots.

Next, you can point to the roughly 18,000 pilots in the United States who will age out by 2022. This is a can Congress kicked down the road in 2007 when it raised the mandatory retirement age to 65 from 60 to delay the exit of all the military pilots who moved to airlines after the Vietnam War.

There is also a bottleneck in the supply of new pilo
lots because of federal legislation passed after the 2009 Colgan Air crash in Buffalo, which was attributed in part to errors by the flight.Among other changes, the law mandated that, as of 2013, all entry-level first officers(that is,co-pilots)on commercial carriers have at least 1, 500 hours of flight time instead of the previous minimum of 250 hours.

“The real problem the industry is facing is young people aren't making the decision to become an airline pilot, ”said Capt. Tim Canoll, a Delta pilot and president of the Air Line Pilots Association.“It takes a very motivated person to meet the physical, emotional and intellectual challenge of becoming a pilot, and that same motivated person does the math
looking at what it takes and the return on investment, and it just doesnt add up, ”particularly when training costs alone can reach S150,000.

The aviator and poet John Magee once described commanding an aircraft as “dancing the skies on laughter-silvered wings.” Easing back the yoke and feeling gravity let go is indeed indescribably exquisite. But now, in aeronautical parlance, the drag of the profession threatens to overwhelm its lift, which could mean a hard landing for the industry.

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Plenty of Passengers, but Where Are the

Plenty of Passengers, but Where Are the

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