One of the leading low cost carriers in the US – Southwest Airlines – is slowing down its hiring of pilots due to the airline not having enough flight instructors. The airline revised its annual hiring estimate of new First Officers down by 148 to 1,200. The shortage of flight instructors affects the training departments ability to oversee classroom curriculum and training on equipment and flight simulators for new pilots and for those upgrading to captain.

“It’s a bottleneck,” Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, said in an interview. “They are doing the absolute best they can, but they just don’t have the people for the amount of training needed.” as quoted by Bloomberg. The result of the lower number of Pilots means that Southwest will have 7% less flying capacity this quarter than in 2019.

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