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Boeing forecasts a need for 466,650 new pilots and 596,500 maintenance personnel to enter the industry over the next 20 years. According to a crew assessment forecast from Boeing, Airlines will need an average of 23,300 new pilots and 30,000 new maintenance personnel per year from 2010 to 2029. These are the numbers the industry needs to produce just to replace those who will retire, plus the additional numbers needed to fly and maintain the much larger world fleet.

Boeing Training & Flight Services CCO Roei Ganzarski said, "When you add up all the numbers, you quickly understand the issues facing this industry. Our challenge is adapting our training to engage the future generation of people who will fly and maintain the more than 30,000 airplanes that will be delivered by 2029."

The demand for highly skilled workers that cannot be trained overnight will also grow exponentially. The report said the largest growth in both pilots and maintenance workers will be in the Asia-Pacific region with a requirement for 180,600 and 220,000 respectively. Within Asia, China will experience the greatest need for pilots and maintenance personnel -- 70,600 and 96,400 respectively.

Boeing forecasts North America will need 97,350 pilots and 137,000 maintenance workers; Europe will need 94,800 pilots and 122,000 maintenance personnel; Africa will need 13,200 pilots and 15,000 maintenance personnel; the Middle East will need 32,700 pilots and 44,500 maintenance personnel; Latin America will need 37,000 pilots and 44,000 maintenance personnel; and the CIS will need 11,000 pilots and 14,000 maintenance personnel.

Concerning the current training methodologies Ganzarski noted that "To accommodate this growing demand, it will be vital to match training with the learning styles of students to come. As an industry, we need to adapt to the learning styles of tomorrow's technologically savvy pilots and mechanics, and ensuring that training is globally accessible, adaptable to individual needs and competency-based."

In Europe alone the expected demand is going to be 4,740 pilots per annum. According “Flight training news” currently, the European capacity to train pilots each year is approximately 1,200 pilots.

At the mean time the marketplace may contain about two years' supply of qualified pilots among those furloughed or trained but not yet hired, and rather less slack in the engineer market. Before that time arrives, however, the airlines are going to have to start working out where the new ones will come from, because the ab-initio training industry, under-invested for years, will also need to grow massively.