If you work in aviation maintenance, none of this will be news to you. Finding qualified engineers has gotten harder, the timelines are longer and the rates people are asking for have climbed steadily since 2019. What's changed recently is that the data is starting to catch up with what people on the ground have been saying for a while.
McKinsey published research a few weeks ago that put a number on it: at current rates of retirement, recruitment and training will not be sufficient to bridge a shortfall projected to reach approximately 60,000 aviation maintenance technicians, roughly 20 percent below industry needs by 2029. That's not a distant problem. 2029 is four years away and the gap is widening now.
The reasons aren't mysterious. A wave of early retirements and job cuts at the onset of COVID-19, combined with lower industry attraction rates and increased attrition to higher-paying industries, pulled experienced technicians out of the workforce faster than anyone anticipated. Some came back. Many didn't. And the training pipeline, always slow by nature hasn't filled the gap.
Hourly wages for aircraft technicians and maintenance engineers have risen more than 20 percent since 2019, which tells you something about supply and demand even without the forecasts. Operators are competing hard for the same pool of people and that pool isn't growing fast enough.
There's another layer that doesn't get talked about as much. Employers are caught having to ensure their technicians hold the qualifications to service both new-generation aircraft, which typically carry more complex maintenance requirements and an aging fleet of legacy types that are staying in service longer than planned. That pulls in opposite directions. It makes type-specific experience more valuable and it makes generalist hiring less useful than it used to be.
McKinsey's suggestion that raising technician productivity to best-quartile levels could mitigate more than 80 percent of the projected shortfall is interesting and probably right for large MROs with the scale to restructure how work gets done. For most operators, though, the more immediate question is simpler: where do we find the people we need and how do we keep them?
There's no clever answer to that. It comes down to having good relationships with candidates before you need them, being honest about what you're offering and moving quickly when the right person is available. That's most of what recruitment actually is, underneath all the technology and process.
The full McKinsey report is worth reading if you're thinking about this from an operational angle: Addressing the Shortage of Aviation Maintenance Technicians
Author: Igor Belov, CEO
Aviation services, including team organisation, technical support and operational solutions for airlines and MROs worldwide. Based in Europe and the UK, operating globally since 2019.
