At AAD, aviation employers, manufacturers and training organisations examined where the skills shortage is being felt, why individual training initiatives are not enough, and what needs to change across the workforce pipeline.
Panel discussion: Addressing the skills shortage in the aviation industry
At Africa Aerospace and Defence (AAD), a panel on aviation skills shortages did not stay confined to the familiar question of pilots and engineers for long. The discussion moved from school subject choices and the shrinking pool of suitable applicants to training capacity, regulatory recognition, the loss of experienced instructors, retention and the difficulty of matching available funding with the way aviation skills are actually developed.
The panel brought together Reshika Singh, Human Resources Executive at Federal Airlines, as chair; Kariska Engels, Executive Manager: Human Resources at Airlink; Ryan van Wijk, CEO of Alt Academy; Shaun Ledlie, Managing Director of Kershal Aviation and Director of the Drone Council of South Africa; Timo Eckardt, Head of Customer Support Africa at Airbus; and Jason Pretorius, Director: Asia West at Milkor.
Although each organisation is approaching the problem from a different part of the industry, their experiences converged on the same difficulty: companies are increasingly having to build, train and retain the skills they need themselves, while the surrounding education, funding and regulatory systems are not always aligned with that work.
Growth depends on more than flight crew
For Airlink, the pressure is visible across the organisation. Engels said the airline has more than doubled its employee headcount over recent years and needs skills at every level if expansion is to remain supportable. The requirement is not limited to pilots, even though the inability to crew additional aircraft would immediately constrain growth.
“We really do need skills on all levels, not just crew, because ultimately, if you don't have pilots, you can't expand, you can't operate your 10 new aircraft.”
Airlink’s response has been to work across several pipelines rather than rely on a single source of recruitment. Engels referred to engagement with high-school students, partnerships with TETA, support for apprentices and a cadet programme. None of those routes produces an immediate result, and each carries a cost.
The time lag is central to the problem. Aviation employers may be recruiting for current vacancies while simultaneously trying to create a workforce that will only become available several years later. Engels’ view was that the scale of the challenge requires an industry response because individual employers cannot carry the full pipeline on their own.
Engineering is becoming the harder gap to fill
From Airbus’s perspective, the most acute shortage is not necessarily in the cockpit. Eckardt said the pilot market is being served comparatively well, even if difficulties remain, while the technician and engineering side presents a more pronounced constraint.
“We see the core demand more on the technician and engineering side.”
He linked the shortage directly to Airbus Southern Africa’s ability to support customers, particularly in helicopter maintenance, where the volume of available applicants and skills is not sufficient. The response has involved awareness work, engagement with universities and outreach in rural areas, but Eckardt stressed that attracting people into training is only useful if a credible career path follows.
That means prospective entrants need to see more than a course or qualification. They need to understand where it can lead, whether employment is likely to follow and how a career can develop once they enter the industry.
Airbus has also begun working with Alt Academy on basic maintenance training, an arrangement van Wijk later described as an MoU with Airbus. Eckardt emphasised that the training is not intended to serve Airbus alone but the wider industry, reflecting the panel’s repeated argument that the shortage cannot be resolved through closed company-specific pipelines.
The candidate pool is being lost before recruitment begins
Ledlie took the discussion further back in the education pipeline. His concern is that aviation employers are competing for a pool of suitable applicants that is becoming smaller, even while the wider population continues to grow.
In his view, one of the decisive points arrives at school when learners move from mathematics to mathematical literacy. For those who may later want to enter engineering and other technically demanding aviation careers, that choice can close off the academic route before they have had meaningful exposure to the industry.
“The awareness should be starting at the source.”
Ledlie argued that aviation has to reach learners while subject choices can still influence their options. He pointed to youth development activity at AAD as an example of using direct industry exposure to show schoolchildren why mathematics matters and what kinds of aviation careers it can open.
Pretorius said Milkor is seeing the same issue from an employer’s side. The company has expanded its UAV engineering capability largely in-house, from one person in 2019 to a team of more than 350, which Pretorius confirmed when the chair put those figures to him, combining experienced aviation professionals with university graduates and younger engineers who can be trained for Milkor’s platforms and standards. Even with that internal development model, however, the quality and number of applicants entering the system remain limiting factors.
“The number of quality applicants … is definitely decreasing.”
The effect is compounded because aerospace and aviation employers are often competing for very similar technical skills. A weaker graduate pool does not affect one company in isolation; it increases competition across the sector and makes growth more difficult for everyone drawing from the same base.
Retention becomes most difficult once experience has value
Milkor’s experience also showed that producing skills does not guarantee they will remain in the business. Pretorius said retention is less problematic among very experienced engineers with 20 to 30 years in the field and among employees joining at entry level. The more difficult group sits in the middle, typically with five to ten years of experience.
At that point, younger professionals have enough capability to be attractive elsewhere and may seek higher salaries, better benefits, experience in another industry or opportunities overseas. That leaves employers exposed precisely when the investment made in developing an employee is beginning to translate into deeper capability.
The panel repeatedly linked retention to career visibility. Pretorius argued that employees want to see how they can progress ten or 15 years into the future. Van Wijk made the same point from the perspective of a pilot, saying that a mapped progression from initial training into airline employment would have retained his services.
“It's not just about money and lifestyle all the time. It's about knowing what's coming.”
That distinction matters because it moves retention away from a purely remuneration-based discussion. Employers may still compete on salary and benefits, but certainty, progression and the prospect of a sustainable career were presented as equally important factors in keeping people in South African aviation.
Experience is also ageing out of the training system
For training organisations, the problem runs in both directions. They have to produce the next generation of aviation professionals while protecting the experience required to train them.
Van Wijk said Alt Academy benefited from recruiting experienced pilots who became available after an airline entered provisional liquidation. Those pilots now form an important part of the organisation’s instructor base, but some are around 65 and others are approaching 80.
The question, in his view, is how to transfer that experience before it disappears. Replacing an instructor numerically is not the same as replacing decades of accumulated operational knowledge, and the loss of senior people creates a second-order shortage inside the training system itself.
Van Wijk was also explicit about the immediate pilot pipeline. He believes the industry is already three to five years behind and said smaller operators are finding it difficult to attract pilots as larger airlines recruit. His proposed interim response includes placing pilots on the skills shortage list and using expatriate pilots to plug immediate gaps while local training catches up.
His criticism was directed less at awareness of the shortage than at the pace of action. Alt Academy is already collaborating with Airbus, Airlink, Federal Airlines and other organisations, and Van Wijk argued that practical arrangements between operators and training providers need to move faster than the industry’s repeated discussion of the problem.
Training funding does not always fit aviation
Airlink’s difficulties are not limited to finding trainees or building training capacity. Engels said the mechanisms through which skills development spending is recognised do not fit aviation cleanly, creating a further bottleneck for employers already paying to develop their own people.
The airline has its own Approved Training Organisation and training facility and develops skills across a much wider range of occupations than pilots and engineers. Engels referred to training for aircraft cleaning, cargo operations, driving and other airside functions, all of which require structured development in an aviation operating environment.
Her concern is that SAQA accreditation and the skills-spend points system have not sufficiently absorbed aviation. An employer can incur the cost of training but still struggle to claim that expenditure back because the relevant accreditation does not align with aviation training.
“We have the speed, we have the capabilities to train, but what else is blocking it?”
That question recurred in different forms across the panel. Funding may exist, companies may be prepared to train and applicants may be interested, but the mechanisms connecting those elements are not necessarily designed around how aviation qualifications and careers work in practice.
Government and industry are working on the same problem from different sides
Ledlie argued that the disconnect cannot be solved by companies continuing to pursue isolated projects. Government, he said, has infrastructure, funding and its own need to develop skills, but the two sides are not talking to each other effectively enough.
He linked that communication gap directly to the difficulties around SAQA alignment and unspent funding, arguing that industry needs to approach government with a complete value-chain solution rather than a collection of unrelated training requests.
The ageing workforce makes the timing more important. Ledlie described the coming loss of senior experience as a demographic cliff. Once those skills leave without being transferred, the gap becomes substantially harder to recover.
Engels returned to the same issue in her closing remarks, saying the scale of the shortage is not reflected in the official government skills shortage list. She called for government to recognise the problem formally and create a platform through which industry participants can work with policymakers on the response.
Drones may create another way into aviation
The panel also considered whether unmanned aviation can provide an additional entry route for young aviators who cannot immediately afford the conventional progression to a commercial pilot licence.
Ledlie’s position was unequivocal: drones are aircraft and should be treated as part of aviation rather than as a separate activity. Because the entry point can be less expensive, drone work can allow a young pilot to earn an income while remaining inside aviation, gaining operational exposure and continuing to build qualifications.
He also pointed to the larger commercial unmanned aircraft expected under Part 72 and noted that the subjects align with those of a commercial pilot licence. In that sense, unmanned aviation may offer both work and relevant experience rather than forcing aspiring pilots to fund their training through unrelated employment.
“Drones are a very legitimate pathway into putting money in young pilots' pockets while they garner skills.”
Pretorius was more circumspect about whether that pathway is already visible in practice at Milkor. He said the company has not seen a significant transition from its workforce into airline flying, and its UAV systems themselves require properly experienced pilots. The discussion identified a possible pathway rather than an established feeder route.
Digitalisation raises the technical bar
Technology was discussed less as a way to reduce the need for people than as a way to make training more scalable and change the skills those people require.
Eckardt said Airbus is using digitalisation to improve training efficiency, including what he described as the first virtual reality H125 simulator on the helicopter side, which Airbus is about to certify, and more interactive classroom exposure to aircraft systems. The same technological shift is changing maintenance itself, with greater use of aircraft data and preventative maintenance.
“The aircraft is talking a lot, but we need to have the people who are able to listen to what the aircraft is telling them.”
That places more emphasis on technical personnel who can interpret and work with increasingly data-rich systems. AI, automation and digitalisation were not presented as substitutes for skilled employees. They add another layer to what those employees must be able to understand.
Policy intervention has to address more than one bottleneck
Asked for the policy changes that could make the greatest difference, the panellists did not identify a single intervention capable of resolving the shortage.
Asked about the regulatory side earlier in the discussion, Ledlie said South Africa’s ICAO grading is excellent, with its civil aviation authority ranked seventh in the world, but that the result has come at a cost to general aviation and grassroots access. When asked for a single policy fix, he called for reform of the Air Services Licensing Act, which he said was promulgated in 1994 and no longer reflects the shape of the industry, particularly in areas such as general aviation and drones. He argued that removing outdated restrictions would open more pathways for young entrants.
Van Wijk’s priority was to establish sound quality and safety foundations before pursuing funding at scale. Alt Academy is also seeking greater collaboration with other flight schools and sees a future role for private-public partnership structures once the training base has been properly established.
Eckardt raised a different problem across the continent: the recognition of education and certificates between countries. Airbus has raised the issue with institutions including AFCAC because scarce skills cannot always be deployed efficiently if qualifications remain locked inside national systems.
“We cannot only look at it from a country perspective.”
For Airbus, the issue is part of the same connectivity challenge facing aviation more broadly. If trained people cannot move to where they are needed, individual countries are left trying to solve the same shortages independently even when suitable skills exist elsewhere on the continent.
The work has already started, but it is still fragmented
One of the clearest points from the AAD discussion was that the industry is not waiting for a single national programme before acting. Airlink is building internal training and career pipelines. Milkor has developed substantial engineering capability in-house. Airbus is working with universities, training providers and youth programmes. Alt Academy is building operating relationships with airlines and other industry participants. The Drone Council and associated organisations are taking aviation awareness into schools.
Those initiatives show willingness and capacity, but they also expose how much of the burden is being carried separately. The same organisations that need trained people are having to create awareness, build training routes, find funding, align qualifications, provide practical experience and then retain the employees they have developed.
Singh’s closing observation reflected that tension. Policy gaps remain and broader intervention is required, but they have not stopped individual organisations from collaborating. What is missing is not evidence of activity. It is a system that connects those efforts more effectively.
The skills shortage described at AAD was consequently not a single shortage with a single solution. It runs from school subject choices to technical training, from entry-level recruitment to mid-career retention, and from the transfer of senior experience to the recognition of qualifications across borders. Solving only the most visible part of that chain will leave the rest of the constraint in place.
