Every night, I hear a report on the network news announcing the number of flights canceled. If it’s a slow news day, reporters might interview a couple of irritated, stranded travelers. Thousands of flights are axed on any given day. Many more are delayed. News readers just read the report, without any substantive questioning about why there’s suddenly a great shortage of pilots. The weather is the only excuse ever offered, and that doesn’t work when there are no storms slowing things down.
What’s going on? We’ve never had a pilot shortage before. We may currently have more air travelers needing flights than a year ago, but not more than before COVID—and yet, here we are, facing an entirely new problem. It’s so bad that American Airlines is offering pilots on its regional carriers double and triple pay for the month of July if they’ll take extra flights.
It’s not hard to figure out what’s happening—despite the seeming prohibition on our pilots saying anything about it. We rarely hear a peep from them, at least on mainstream news outlets. There’s even a noticeable dearth of questions asked at Fox News of late. Nobody is questioning this fiasco beyond some Fox Business report of a lot of pilot retirements. It just is, apparently.
There are always going to be retirements and saying, as the link above does, that it’s “expensive to become a pilot.” Give me a break! That’s never been an issue before. So why even consider it now? What job does one get where advanced training doesn’t cost money?
Let’s put the blame for this shortage squarely where it belongs: On COVID “vaccination” policy. Many pilots who got the jabs are suffering injuries and have been unable to pass their required 6-month comprehensive physicals. None of us want a pilot who has a heart attack mid-flight. If you search the net, you come up with reports like this one from last week that pretty much says it all but they’re not from mainstream sources, of course. Such reports are forbidden fruit for widely heard reporters.
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