What Bill says is an oversimplification. His claim that airlines are “lying” is, in itself, a lie. Clearly, he has an axe to grind.
“Certification” as a commercial pilot is not the same as having a pilot on staff at a major airline, any more than having a doubling of medical school graduates puts board-certified surgeons in operating rooms.
It can be years, even decades, to go from a commercial pilot certificate to an airline cockpit. My commercial certificate was earned in 1988. I started with United in 1997. I was fully qualified 4 months (yes, months) later, in early 1998.
My daughter graduated medical school in 2019. She has three years of surgery residency left until she is fully qualified.
Many airlines screwed up staffing during Covid. They parked huge numbers of airplanes, whole fleet types, and offered early retirement incentives. When travel rebounded, many airlines were not able to get enough of their remaining pilots retrained.
Pilots who were fully qualified on an airplane that is no longer flown have to be retrained for a new airplane and that takes several weeks, if the training staff can handle it.
But…many training centers were shut down by airlines, as well as regulatory authorities (state and municipal) to prevent the spread of COVID, so, pilot and instructor currency lapsed, and training capacity was diminished. Some airlines are only now recovering training capacity, and yes, they did add flights before they had staffing in place.
Further, pilots are in the public all the time. They get COVID, too, and sick call rates have been higher as a result. Airlines, some airlines, failed to plan for this.
Jet Blue is a hot mess. They don’t have a contract, they cut pilot pay, talked of furlough, during the pandemic and then thought they could rely on pilot good will to work overtime now that travel is back. Didn’t quite work that way.
There is a pilot shortage. There is also a failure by some airlines to properly plan.
Bill O’Reilly can’t tell the difference, and it’s clear that he hates Jet Blue.
