No prior experience? No problem, for Frontier Airlines.
Looking for a way to make headway with the global pilot shortage issue, Frontier will start is own pilot training academy and no previous time on the flight deck is needed.
"We're starting our own farm club," Frontier VP of Flight Operations Brad Lambert told 9 News Denver, referring to the Major League Baseball term of having several minor league teams under the parent club for players to hone their skills before making it to the big leagues.
The facility will be known as the Flight Cadet Program, an $8 million investment by the airline at a time when pilots are at a premium. The pilot shortage, which had been predicted for years, gained unwanted speed and significance when the pandemic hit. The combination of airlines offering early retirement, buyouts, and some pilots reaching the mandatory retirement age of 65 proved to be a perfect storm for the industry.
So Frontier, like other airlines, is taking matters into its own hands.
"We really want to provide an opportunity for aspiring pilots," Lambert said. "We also want to be able to control our destiny going forward."
Frontier joins a host of airlines looking to solve the pilot shortage issue from the inside. Untied Airlines, for instance, opened its own flight training academy earlier this year. Alaska Airlines is partnering with the Hillsboro Aero Academy to open a flight school. Southwest also announced it was resuming construction of its pilot training center.
Frontier will open its applications to anyone with an interest in becoming a pilot, and will choose 35 cadet candidates a month to continue with more extensive training.
"We'll obviously pull in those applications and rank them according to what we are looking for and we'll put the applicants through a pretty aggressive vetting process, interviews, aptitude testing, things like that," said Lambert.
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