The Airline That Wins the Talent War Can Still Lose the Network
Aviation companies have spent the past several years competing intensely for pilots, engineers, technicians, instructors, examiners and other scarce specialists. From the perspective of an individual airline, that logic is difficult to challenge. If a capability is essential to flying, maintenance or training, management has a responsibility to secure it, retain it and maintain enough depth to protect the operation when somebody leaves or becomes unavailable.
The difficulty is that aviation does not operate as a collection of independent companies. Airlines depend on MRO organisations, regional partners, training providers, ground handlers, airports, air navigation service providers and specialist contractors that frequently recruit from the same limited pools of human expertise. An airline can therefore strengthen its own workforce while simultaneously weakening another organisation upon which its aircraft, passengers or network still depend.
That creates a paradox airline boards should examine much more closely. A carrier can win the competition for talent and still lose productive capacity because the capability it acquired has simply moved from another part of the aviation ecosystem. Recruitment can solve an employer's shortage without necessarily solving aviation's shortage, which means successful hiring and increased industry capability should not be assumed to be the same thing.
The strategic workforce question should therefore become broader than, "Can we hire enough people?" For every critical human capability capable of constraining an operation, leadership should decide whether the organisation needs to own it, gain reliable access to it or help create more of it. That distinction could provide a much more useful basis for aviation workforce planning than treating every shortage as another vacancy to be filled.
Published: 6 November 2026
Written by: Todd Skaggs
Aviation Can Move a Shortage Faster Than It Can Solve One
The post-pandemic US pilot market demonstrated the problem particularly clearly. As larger airlines rebuilt capacity, experienced pilots moved from regional carriers into network and low-cost airlines, creating acute pressure around regional captain populations. US Government Accountability Office analysis subsequently found that one network airline withdrew regional service from 29 airports during the height of the shortage, while regional operators reported aircraft that could not be fully utilised because the available balance of captains and first officers could not support planned flying.
Regional airlines responded through the labour market. Among the carriers examined by the GAO, average first-year first-officer hourly rates rose from roughly $52 in 2021 to approximately $93 by 2024. Higher pay improved the attractiveness of regional employment and supported recruitment, but compensation could not instantly manufacture experienced captains because progression still required training, qualification and accumulated operational experience.
When an experienced regional captain moves to a larger airline, the receiving airline has genuinely strengthened its operation and the pilot may have improved their pay, career opportunities and working conditions. What has not necessarily happened is an increase in the total number of experienced captains available to aviation. The receiving company has acquired capability that previously existed somewhere else in the system.
Hiring an experienced professional usually reallocates existing capability from one part of the labour market to another. Development can create additional independently deployable capability, while appropriate access arrangements can improve how effectively existing capability is used. These are different workforce mechanisms, and confusing them can lead organisations to apply the wrong solution to the wrong problem.
The same principle can apply to certifying engineers, avionics specialists, instructors, examiners and other scarce professionals. Competitive employment markets are healthy, and aviation professionals should remain free to pursue better opportunities, but leadership needs to distinguish between acquiring capability and increasing the total amount of capability available to the industry. Pay can redistribute expertise far faster than the training system can recreate it.
This is the distinction that should shape the rest of the workforce conversation. Some capability belongs permanently inside the organisation, some may be accessible through properly designed external arrangements and some does not yet exist in sufficient quantity. Leadership needs to understand which situation it is facing before deciding how to respond.
The Shortage Can Simply Change Address
The consequences become more important when the organisation losing the capability is part of the same ecosystem as the organisation recruiting it. Consider an airline attempting to strengthen its engineering workforce by identifying experienced licensed engineers in the local labour market, offering attractive conditions and successfully recruiting them. From the perspective of recruitment targets, vacancies filled and internal engineering coverage, the campaign appears to be a success.
Now consider where those engineers came from. If several previously worked for an MRO maintaining the airline's aircraft, the position becomes more complicated because internal capability has increased while an external provider may have become less capable of performing work the airline continues to purchase. The organisation may have solved one workforce constraint by creating or amplifying another.
Similar dynamics can occur elsewhere. A network airline may recruit experienced pilots from regional partners whose feed supports its network, while an operator recruiting instructors from a training organisation may later discover that training capacity has become the new constraint on producing additional pilots. A company might also recruit a highly specialised technical professional from a supplier whose expertise remains operationally important to the same customer.
None of this means organisations should stop recruiting from one another. Labour mobility rewards experience, enables career progression and forces employers to improve pay, conditions and opportunity. The management problem is not that skilled professionals move, but whether the aviation system understands the consequences when scarce capability moves with them.
The shortage has not necessarily disappeared. It may simply have changed address, and that means recruitment success needs to be viewed alongside the capability that remains elsewhere in the system.
A Strong Airline Can Still Sit Inside a Fragile Workforce Ecosystem
Conventional workforce planning tends to concentrate on the employees inside the organisation. Airlines generally know how many pilots they employ, how many engineers are qualified on each fleet and where shortages exist across their own departments, yet they may have much less visibility into the human capability embedded inside critical suppliers and partners.
That matters because operational resilience does not stop at the company boundary. An airline may have strong pilot coverage while a regional partner lacks captains, or robust internal engineering numbers while a contracted line-maintenance provider has almost no spare capability. The airline may also have enough employees internally while the training organisation needed to qualify the next group of specialists has itself become constrained.
An internal workforce dashboard can therefore look reassuring while part of the workforce architecture supporting the airline is already fragile. The aircraft does not care whose payroll contains the unavailable capability because the consequence can still be delayed maintenance, reduced capacity or cancelled flying. From an operational perspective, the relevant system is the complete chain of human capability required to convert aircraft, infrastructure and demand into actual flying.
Aviation therefore needs to look beyond company workforce resilience and understand ecosystem workforce resilience. That requires leadership to examine the critical human dependencies sitting outside the organisation with the same seriousness applied to internal capability.
Introducing the Ecosystem Capability Floor
A practical way of exposing that vulnerability is to extend Critical Capability Coverage beyond the airline itself. Critical Capability Coverage, or CCC, asks whether enough independently deployable qualified people exist to sustain a critical function. If a defined activity requires four appropriately qualified and authorised people and five genuinely independent people are available, CCC is 1.25, while exactly four available people would produce CCC of 1.0 and no numerical buffer against the loss of one person.
The limitation is that an airline can have strong CCC internally while relying on external functions whose coverage is significantly weaker. That suggests a broader management measure: the Ecosystem Capability Floor, or ECF. In simple terms, ECF is the lowest verified Critical Capability Coverage among the critical internal and external human capabilities required to sustain a defined operation.
Imagine an airline examining one strategically important base. Flight Operations has CCC of 1.35, internal Engineering has 1.40, contracted line maintenance has 1.10, critical ground-handling capability has 0.95 and an essential training capability has 0.88. The airline may appear well protected if management looks only at its own workforce, but its Ecosystem Capability Floor is 0.88.
ECF is not intended to calculate the probability of disruption, nor should a particular number be treated as a universal regulatory threshold. It is a diagnostic management measure that identifies where the thinnest human-capability coverage sits across a defined operational path so leadership knows where deeper risk analysis is required. Two capabilities with the same ECF can present very different risks because the consequences, substitution options and time required to restore them may be completely different.
That last point matters enormously. A capability that can be recreated in several months is fundamentally different from one requiring years of qualification, progression and accumulated operational experience. Boards should therefore examine both current coverage and the time required to rebuild capability once it is lost.
Some Vacancies Take Years to Replace
Traditional workforce reporting can make very different shortages appear deceptively similar. Ten unfilled positions can be presented as ten vacancies even when the time required to convert a new employee into independently deployable capability differs by several years. The number of vacancies therefore tells management very little about the depth of the underlying risk unless development time is also understood.
Some roles can be recruited and trained relatively quickly. Others depend on licences, aircraft types, recency, company authorisations, operational exposure or progression through several earlier positions, which means the real replacement cycle can be much longer than the recruitment cycle. A vacancy may be filled administratively months before the organisation has genuinely replaced the capability that disappeared.
The strategic importance of a capability should therefore reflect not only how scarce it is today but how difficult it would be to recreate after it was lost. Losing a capability with a three-month development cycle creates a different exposure from losing one whose replacement requires five years of training, progression and operational experience. The longer the recreation period, the less sensible it becomes to treat the requirement as an ordinary vacancy.
This also explains why recruitment alone cannot solve every aviation skills shortage. An organisation may be able to acquire experienced capability from another employer far faster than it can create the same capability itself, but if every employer follows that strategy the industry becomes increasingly dependent upon somebody else funding the development pipeline. Someone has to create the people everyone wants to recruit.
Own, Access or Create
Once leadership understands the ecosystem and the time required to recreate capability, the workforce decision becomes clearer. Not every constraint should automatically result in another permanent vacancy, and not every scarce capability needs to be treated in exactly the same way. The appropriate response depends on how continuously the expertise is required, how transferable it is and whether enough of it exists in the market at all.
Own applies where capability is required continuously, response needs to be immediate, company-specific knowledge is substantial, regulatory accountability is closely linked to the organisation or the consequences of insufficient internal depth are unacceptable. Permanent employment and internal succession are entirely rational in these circumstances because the capability forms part of the organisation's core resilience. Ownership also protects institutional knowledge and creates the internal experience from which future specialists can develop.
Access applies where capability is required intermittently, can legally and operationally be provided across organisational boundaries and does not necessarily justify permanent duplication inside every company. Access should not mean waiting until a problem occurs and then urgently entering the labour market. It means establishing in advance where appropriate capability could come from, what approvals would be required, how quickly it could be deployed and who retains responsibility.
Create applies when there simply are not enough appropriately capable people in the market. Recruitment may still allow one organisation to improve its position, but moving the same finite population between employers cannot resolve a structural shortage. The response then needs to include training, progression, qualification, instructor capacity, mentoring, early-career opportunities and enough practical exposure for developing professionals to become independently useful.
A resilient workforce strategy may use all three simultaneously. An airline might maintain sufficient permanent capability for normal operations, secure additional specialist expertise during peaks or disruption, and invest in developing the next generation required for future growth. The point is not that one model is superior, but that management should know which problem it is trying to solve.
Hiring, Development and Access Solve Different Problems
Recruitment, development and temporary access are often discussed as variations of the same workforce solution, but they perform fundamentally different functions. Hiring an experienced professional normally transfers capability towards the organisation that currently values it most, which can improve productivity, reward scarce expertise and support growth. It does not automatically increase the number of people capable of doing the work.
Development is different because progression can create new independently deployable capability. A first officer becoming a captain, a technician becoming a licensed engineer or an experienced professional becoming an instructor can increase what the aviation system is capable of doing. That process usually takes longer, which is precisely why short-term commercial pressure can favour acquisition over creation.
Access solves another problem again. When demand for specialised expertise is intermittent, the industry may sometimes gain more resilience from making existing capability reliably available than from every organisation permanently duplicating the same specialist capacity. That possibility becomes particularly relevant where the cost of maintaining underutilised redundancy is high but the operational consequence of losing access is equally significant.
The mechanism should therefore follow the diagnosis. A temporary seasonal requirement may not justify years of permanent excess capacity, while a permanent fleet expansion cannot sensibly depend indefinitely on temporary specialists. A structural shortage cannot be solved simply by circulating too few people more efficiently.
Access May Sometimes Be More Efficient Than Ownership
For some scarce aviation skills, reliable access could eventually extend beyond conventional contracting towards carefully designed Shared Critical Capability Networks. This would not involve airlines casually lending safety-critical employees to one another when somebody becomes unavailable, because licences, organisational approvals, recurrent training, fatigue, security, insurance, employment law and regulatory accountability make many aviation capabilities unsuitable for informal transfer.
A more credible model would identify a narrow number of specialist capabilities where demand is intermittent, losing access has significant operational consequences and regulated deployment between approved organisations is feasible. Qualifications, company-specific preparation, contractual arrangements, availability and accountability could then be established before the capability is urgently required, providing a credible contingency route rather than forcing the organisation into an emergency labour market.
Training, examining and certain specialist engineering capabilities may be particularly worth exploring because shortages in these areas can affect much more than the output of one individual. An instructor or examiner contributes to creating additional qualified people, while the absence of one specialised engineering approval can constrain an operation despite apparently adequate overall engineering headcount.
Shared capability would not suit every role and should never weaken safety, professional accountability or legitimate competition for employees. Its value is much narrower: in selected circumstances, aviation may need guaranteed access to scarce expertise without requiring every organisation to permanently own every unit of that expertise.
The Responsibility Does Not Sit With the Employee
The wider industry argument should not be interpreted as suggesting that pilots, engineers or other specialists have an obligation to remain with one employer to protect the aviation ecosystem. They should be free to improve their pay, career progression, location, working conditions and quality of life, and mobility is one of the mechanisms through which better employers are rewarded.
If the movement of skilled professionals destabilises an essential part of the aviation system, that is a workforce architecture problem for employers, boards and industry institutions to solve. The answer cannot be transferring responsibility for an inadequate training pipeline or fragile supplier workforce onto the individual professional. A resilient industry should be capable of supporting career mobility without making one person's advancement somebody else's operational crisis.
A more sophisticated workforce model should actually create more opportunities for people rather than fewer. Better access arrangements could support flexible employment, broader experience, project work or continued participation by highly experienced professionals who no longer want conventional full-time careers but still possess valuable expertise. Industry resilience and employee opportunity do not need to be opposing objectives.
Suppliers' Workforce Capability Is Enterprise Risk
One consequence of this approach is that workforce resilience needs to become part of how airlines evaluate strategically important suppliers. Procurement teams already examine price, financial health, quality, contractual performance and operational capacity, but where a supplier provides a service capable of constraining aircraft operations, management should also understand how much critical human expertise sits behind that service.
How many independently qualified people does the supplier depend upon? How long would replacements take to develop, and are apparently independent alternative suppliers recruiting from the same local labour pool? Does the supplier depend on one or two authorisations whose loss could materially reduce the service available to the airline?
There is also a more uncomfortable question that needs to cross departmental boundaries: is the airline itself recruiting heavily from that supplier? An organisation could identify an MRO as operationally critical while its recruitment team is simultaneously targeting experienced engineers employed by the same provider. Each decision may look rational when viewed separately, but together they can create an enterprise contradiction.
Before celebrating a successful recruitment campaign, an airline should therefore understand whether it has recruited people required to provide a service it is still purchasing from somebody else. That is not an argument against hiring those professionals, but it is an argument for understanding the second-order consequences before declaring the workforce problem solved.
Aviation Must Become Better at Creating Capability
Permanent ownership and external access can improve how organisations secure and use the workforce that already exists. Neither solves a structural deficit when too few people are progressing through the pipeline. That distinction can be obscured by successful recruitment because one airline can add substantial numbers of experienced employees even while the broader market remains constrained.
An airline may reasonably conclude that the market supplied what it needed when in reality the market simply transferred capability from several other aviation organisations. Boards should therefore ask how much of their newly available critical capability was created through development and how much was acquired already qualified. Both have value, but they tell leadership very different things about the health of the underlying workforce market.
A cadet becoming a productive pilot, a first officer progressing to captain, a technician becoming a licensed engineer or a professional gaining instructor or examiner authority represents additional capability entering the system. Moving an already qualified person between employers reallocates existing capability instead. If every organisation wants experienced professionals while too few invest in creating them, competition can intensify almost indefinitely without resolving the underlying shortage.
Sustainable aviation capacity therefore depends not only on being good at recruitment, but on enough organisations investing in the process through which experience is produced. Workforce strategy should measure what is being created as carefully as what is being acquired.
AI Can Help Determine Whether the Problem Is Being Solved or Moved
Artificial intelligence can support this model, but it should remain an enabler rather than the centre of the workforce argument. Aviation organisations already hold significant information covering qualifications, recurrent training, rosters, planned leave, retirement exposure, fleet activity, vacancies, training demand and future capacity requirements. More sophisticated analytics could combine those signals to identify where critical human capability is likely to tighten before the shortage becomes operational.
The more interesting opportunity is not simply predicting vacancies. AI could help leadership determine whether moving scarce capability from one organisation to another actually improves the wider system or merely relocates the vulnerability. A model might identify that releasing a particular specialist would reduce another provider below its required coverage, that three apparently independent suppliers depend upon the same small regional population of licensed engineers or that recurring demand for one capability can no longer reasonably be treated as a temporary access problem.
Technology should not decide where people work or control individual careers. Its role is decision intelligence, giving management better visibility into where fragility is developing and whether a proposed workforce intervention solves the problem or simply moves it elsewhere. Sometimes the most valuable conclusion may be the simplest: there is no allocation solution, and aviation needs to create more qualified people.
Diagnose the Shortage Before Funding the Solution
The framework becomes most useful when management first determines what kind of shortage it is actually facing. An allocation problem exists when sufficient qualified capability exists but is positioned away from current demand, while an access problem exists when capability exists elsewhere but regulation, geography, contracts or organisational approvals prevent it being deployed where it is needed. A creation problem exists when the necessary capability does not exist in sufficient quantity anywhere useful.
The response should follow the diagnosis. Allocation problems may sometimes be addressed through better workforce planning or temporary deployment, access problems may require pre-arranged external capability, while creation problems require training, progression and long-term development. Permanent recruitment may contribute to each response, but it should not automatically be treated as the complete answer to all three.
The important question is therefore not simply whether the company lacks people. Leadership needs to understand whether the organisation lacks capability, lacks access to capability that already exists or operates in a market that simply needs to create more of it. That diagnosis should happen before another vacancy becomes the default solution.
The Board Conversation Needs to Change
Aviation has become extraordinarily sophisticated at managing physical capacity. Airlines understand the economics of owning versus leasing aircraft, purchasing simulator capacity, outsourcing maintenance, using specialist providers and obtaining temporary lift when required. Human capability deserves comparable strategic discipline.
Boards should know which capabilities genuinely need permanent internal ownership, which can be accessed under appropriate arrangements and which are structurally too scarce for redistribution to provide a sustainable answer. They should also know where the weakest capability sits across the wider operating ecosystem and how long it would take to recreate if lost.
This is the practical meaning of Capability Economics. It is not an attempt to treat people like physical assets on a spreadsheet, but a way of connecting workforce decisions with operational capacity, supplier resilience and the time required to create genuine expertise. The central purpose is to make workforce strategy a deliberate operational decision rather than an automatic response to vacancies.
The Airline That Wins the Talent War Can Still Lose the Network
Aviation does not need to stop competing for talent. Competition can improve careers, compensation, working conditions and organisational performance, while professionals must remain free to move between employers when stronger opportunities exist. What the industry should stop doing is confusing successful recruitment with increased industry capability.
Recruitment changes who owns capability. It does not necessarily increase how much capability exists. A person moving from one employer to another may solve an immediate vacancy while leaving the underlying shortage unchanged, or may move that shortage into an MRO, regional partner, training provider or supplier upon which the recruiting airline still depends. The real measure of progress is therefore not simply whether one company has acquired the people it needs, but whether the wider capability system has become stronger.
The strategic workforce question is no longer simply, "Can we hire another one?" Boards need to determine whether critical expertise belongs permanently inside the organisation, whether reliable access can provide sufficient resilience or whether the industry must invest in producing more of it. That decision should be informed by the vulnerability of the wider ecosystem as well as by the vacancy sitting inside the company.
The airline that wins the talent war can still lose the network if its success strengthens the organisation while weakening the system required to keep it operating. The companies that understand the difference between acquiring capability, accessing it and creating it will be better placed to stop merely moving workforce shortages around aviation and start building the human capacity the industry actually needs.
Key Facts
Airlines increasingly compete for the same pools of pilots, engineers, instructors, examiners and other aviation specialists.
Recruitment can redistribute existing capability between organisations without increasing the total amount of capability available to the industry.
The post-pandemic pilot shortage showed how larger airlines could strengthen their own operations while creating pressure elsewhere in the aviation ecosystem.
Workforce shortages can move between airlines, MROs, training providers, regional operators and other critical aviation partners.
The article introduces the concept of the Ecosystem Capability Floor (ECF), a measure intended to identify the weakest critical capability within an operational ecosystem.
Some aviation capabilities take years to recreate because they depend on licences, qualifications, operational experience and progression pathways.
Leadership should determine whether critical capabilities need to be owned, accessed or created rather than treating all shortages as recruitment problems.
Recruitment, development and access arrangements solve different workforce challenges and should not be treated as interchangeable solutions.
Airlines should evaluate supplier workforce resilience as carefully as they evaluate operational and financial resilience.
Long-term aviation capacity depends not only on hiring experienced professionals but also on creating new capability through training, mentoring and progression.
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Author: Todd Skaggs Aviation staffing and consultancy insights LinkedIn
