Students at Naples Air Center always dress professionally with their black pants, white shirts and ties. COURTESY PHOTO / NAPLES AIR CENTER
Future pilots are flying in from around the country and even the world to train in Florida. They are lured by great weather that gives them more time in the sky, by a plethora of local flying schools that entice them with newer planes, enhanced programs and top instructors, and by a career that is offering high salaries and signing bonuses due to a severe shortage of pilots.
There were 135,300 airline and commercial pilots in 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the number is expected to grow 6% over the next decade, sparking a demand to hire another 18,000 pilots each year. That’s not easy. The baby boomer pilots are all near the federally mandated retirement age of 65. The traditional pathway of military pilots transitioning to the airlines has significantly dropped. Airlines also lost a tremendous number of pilots during the Covid pandemic. When air travel plummeted, airlines offered generous retirement deals for thousands of senior pilots.
“When Covid came they offered a buyout because nobody was flying and they paid them 50% of their salary to stay home. When Covid was over, that created a huge shortage because a lot of those pilots did not come back,” said Peter Lepore, who retired in January 2023 after being a pilot for American Airlines for 33 years and is now teaching flight instructors at Paragon Flight Training at Page Field in Fort Myers.
An analysis by Oliver Wyman, a New York based management consulting firm, shows that North America has a shortage of about 8,000 pilots and that number is expected to increase to 29,000 by the end of the decade leaving airlines struggling to produce enough pilots to fly their planes.
Producing pilots
Many of those future pilots are right here in Florida.
Local airports from Punta Gorda, Page Field, Naples, Marco Island and West Palm Beach all have numerous flight schools. Some have partnerships with the airlines, others work with universities.
Students from around the world are in classrooms, on simulators and flying planes at the Naples Airport.
Naples Air Center helps students get a private pilot’s license in as little as six weeks. Students in Collier County are lucky. They can apply for a scholarship from the James C. Ray Foundation that gives them about $12,000, often enough to pay for the 40 hours needed for a private license. Flying is expensive, so many of them work as flight instructors or fly skydiving or crop planes as they work toward the 1,500 hours for an airline transport pilot license needed to fly for one of the commercial airlines.
Students love the weather and the scenery as they learn to fly in Collier County at Naples Air Center.
“It is the best time in the world to be in aviation because there is such a demand for aviation and airline travel,” said Richard
Gentil, owner of Naples Air Center.
Naples Air Center partners with Purdue University. Gentil encourages his students to get a college education along with a pilot’s license. The courses are online and the program costs about $40,000.
“They don’t need to do Purdue if they don’t want, but if anything happens and you can’t fly anymore, you need the fouryear degree,” Gentil explained.
Student pilots get ready for a morning of flying at Naples Air Center. ANDREA STETSON / FLORIDA WEEKLY
Naples Air also partners with Sky West and that’s where some of his students start their professional careers. The school has trained more than 13,000 pilots since it started in 1975. About 80% go on to work for an airline, while the other 20% fly small single-engine planes. Many students come from far away to train in Naples.
“Here they are flying twice a day, every day,” Gentil said. “They would be lucky to fly twice a month back home for the Scandinavians or in England. They don’t have the weather to fly year round. For us, except for a couple of days when a hurricane goes by, we’re good. If you spend six months flying twice a day every day, you progress very quickly. If you fly once a week, you are going to be forgetting the things you are learning.”
Gentil laid out a plan for how quickly someone can progress through the classes. A student can get a private pilot’s license in as little as six weeks. Another six weeks and he or she can get the FAA instrument rating and in seven more weeks the student can become a flight instructor earning $40 an hour. It takes another one or two years to compile the 1,500 hours needed to work for a commercial airline where the pilot can earn a starting salary near $100,000 plus a signing bonus.
That’s the same route students take at Fort Myers’ Page Field. At Paragon, the walls are covered, floor to ceiling, with the signatures of students and the dates they received their pilot’s licenses. Chris Schoensee, president and owner of Paragon, said it is now easier than ever to afford to become a pilot.
“With the increased demand, there are more lenders out there for pilots,” Schoensee explained. “They are seeing the high salaries and signing bonuses. We have a list of 75 different grants and scholarships that we give to our students. There is so much money out there, especially if you are female or a minority.”
Schoensee admits people can be turned away from a career as a pilot when they see the huge price tag for flying time.
Students from around the world take classes at Naples Air Center. NAPLES AIR CENTER / COURTESY PHOTO
“One student paid for all the training with scholarship money and grant money,” Schoensee described. “The perception that this is an unattainable thing is wrong. There is tons of money out there. You just have to work for it.”
It is even affordable for students who don’t get scholarships, Schoensee explained.
“A student should be able to go to a reputable school and get everything to be a commercial pilot for $80,000,” he said. “While they are getting their hours they can pay down that debt.”
Paragon is enhancing and expanding its program to meet the demand. They have a fleet of 2021 Piper P1001 planes that are specifically made for training, and all their planes are the same.
“Southwest is doing it that way and we looked at why,” Schoensee said. “If a student has a plane with a problem they can pop into another plane.”
Paragon offers a discovery mini lesson for $189. During the lesson students get ground instruction and fly the plane when it is in the air.
SCHOENSEE
“It is a good way for a student to try the school out,” Schoensee said. And lots of students are trying it out and then enrolling.
“In 2010 when we started, we were waiting for the phone to ring,” Schoensee described. “We were having Nerf gun wars during the day. The money was not there. It was just the people who really had a passion.”
With the Nerf wars gone and a very busy flight school, Paragon is expanding. It recently opened a satellite office at the Punta Gorda Airport in Charlotte County.
“We are looking to build it out and have it grow,” Schoensee said. “This airport is capping out on the capacity, and Charlotte County is growing.”
Flight schools are so popular that many of the local airports have more than one. ATP Flight School is the nation’s largest. It is headquartered in Jacksonville Beach, but operates 75 locations across the country, including Page Field. The organization has 38 airline partners and has placed more than 1,200 graduates at airlines in the last 12 months. ATP recently partnered with Avelo, Breeze, Frontier, Spirit and Sun Country, which allow graduates to go straight to a first officer position after 1,500 hours of flight time.
A view of the Collier County shorleline as experienced by a student at Naples Air Center. NAPLES AIR CENTER / COURTESY PHOTO
ATP’s Page Field’s 19,000-square-foot training center includes classrooms and simulator space.
In Charlotte County, in addition to Paragon, there are several other flight schools including Flight Fast Track, Harborside Aviation and LCP Aviation.
In Palm Beach County, Justin Hein, the general manager of Aamro Aviation, is keeping up with the demand by purchasing newer aircraft for students at his two flight school locations. Aamro operates from North County and Lantana and recently purchased five 2023 Cessna and Piper planes to add to its fleet.
“It is definitely good to be aware of the pilot shortage,” Hein said. “We need to meet the demand.”
Aamro partners with Liberty University, giving students the opportunity to graduate with a four-year aviation degree and their pilot’s license. While the salaries for pilots are now soaring, Hein said that’s not the only reason why people are flocking to the profession.
“It is not just about the money, it is about the passion as well,” he said.
Jack Walter is one of his students.
“It’s always been in my blood,” he said about flying. “I grew up loving airplanes.”
Walter hopes to one day fly for Delta or United.
“My mom is a flight attendant for United,” he said. “Someday we might fly together.”
Mackenzie Dieter never thought about becoming a pilot, but now she is training for that career at Aamro. Dieter was studying homeland security at Embry-Riddle in Daytona Beach and was surrounded by aviation majors.
“I had a ton of pilot friends there,” she began. “There was aviation all around me and I just fell in love with it.”
Richard Gentil, owner of Naples Air Center, is proud to see so many students earning their pilot’s licenses. NAPLES AIR CENTER / COURTESY PHOTO
She said Aamro is the perfect place to train. She loves having all the new planes and she enjoys the location.
“I think it is the perfect spot,” she said. “You can fly to so many places. I fly to the Keys a lot.”
Dieter got her commercial pilot’s license in December. Her twin sister got one the previous month. Dieter said one day she and her twin might be seen in the cockpit for a major airline.
“Maybe for Delta,” she said.
Embry-Riddle has been called the Harvard of avation. The school is known for producing some of the best educated pilots. Ken Byrnes, assistant dean and associate professor of aeronautical science and chairman of the flight department, said a degree in aviation is so much better than just going to flight school.
“They get an education, not just training,” Byrnes began. “We work on making them the best pilots for the industry. They get everything they need to be successful in the industry — and they get a college education.”
The walls at Paragon Flight School at Page Field are covered with the signatures of students who received their pilot’s licenses. PARAGON FLIGHT / COURTESY PHOTOS
Byrnes said being a pilot takes more than racking up flight hours.
“A pilot is not just somebody who knows how to fly. It is somebody who makes good decisions. That is what the airlines want,” he stressed. “The responsibility for the people on that airplane and for the brand is the pilot, and the airlines want them to have the right values and beliefs and skills and the professional aptitude to make the right decisions.”
Byrnes said major airlines seek out Embry-Riddle graduates and start interviewing students for future jobs in their second and third year of college. While most students will spend a year as a flight instructor and another year or two with a regional airline before flying with a major carrier, there are some students who go right to the big leagues.
“We have people leaving here that go right to Frontier and are flying an Airbus. We have some leave here and go right to Atlas and right into a 737,” Byrnes said. “It certainly is a good time to be in the industry. I am jealous of them all.”
Students learning to fly at Paragon in Fort Myers.
Future in flying
The students at these flying schools come from a wide variety of backgrounds and hometowns. Some are locals who started flight school during high school or right after graduation; others come from around the nation or the world.
Elizabeth Sculles got her private pilot’s license in 2019 and is now racking up the hours she needs to be a commercial pilot. She gets a lot of those hours as a flight instructor at Naples Air Center.
“When I was about 16, I had a random thought of what would it take to be a pilot, but I was involved in sports and then when I was graduating I thought about it again,” she described.
She took classes at Liberty University and got a degree in aviation and aviation management while also taking lessons at the Naples Airport.
“I have 560 hours now and they are coming along fast,” she said. “Just the other day, I was flying with my student and I was thinking, ‘I get paid to do this’. The privileges are really cool. I can be in the Bahamas in an hour. I can take my family flying.”
Amanda Grossman ended up at Naples Flight Center from a different path. She joined the Marine Corps after high school and when her active military career was done, the Covid pandemic had begun.
“So I came down here to live with my family and I met somebody who offered me a ride in a little plane, and I just couldn’t stay away,” she said. “I knew I loved flying, but it didn’t feel accessible until I went to a small airport and met people my age learning to fly.”
Grossman now has 1,000 flying hours. But Sculles and Grossman probably won’t be helping the commercial pilot shortage. Both ladies want to work for smaller private companies.
Tim Schum and Annie Graffis moved to Fort Myers to train at Paragon.
“I was looking at options and I came across it on a community forum, and on Reddit this had the best reviews,” said Schum who moved here from New Jersey.
“I was looking at some of the bigger schools and read online that some of the larger schools are pushing them through fast or trying to keep them there and milk them for money,” said Graffis who moved here from Virginia. “I did research and found that Florida was the best place to learn to fly, and there is no better place to learn to fly than here.”
When Graffis signed up for a discovery flight in Virginia, it was cancelled three times due to bad weather. That didn’t happen in Fort Myers where she immediately enjoyed her flight.
Both future pilots say it is a love of flying that keeps them going.
“Since I was a kid, I knew I would never like a desk job,” Schum said. “I like cars and boats, and planes are top tier.”
“It’s the ability to be able to experience so many different places while also not sitting behind a desk every day and just looking forward to my next vacation,” Graffis added.
Some students put all their focus and money into flying and finish fast. Others take years, working at other jobs and saving for more flight time.
Schum started flight school in June, Graffis has been there for a year and a half. Yet both have about the same amount of hours.
“We will both get to the same point, but Tim is getting there faster,” Graffis said.
Both are looking at a variety of options for the future. Schum is steering toward flying for a private company. Graffis has dreamier ideas.
“My lofty dream is to fly a sports team in a private plane, she said. “More realistic, I would like to go into aircraft sales.”