Abstract
The aviation industry needs a labor supply sufficient to sustain growth, which is predicted to outpace the supply of new pilots. The North American airline industry will need approximately 5,746 pilots per year through 2036, but the flight training industry has only averaged only 1,394 new qualified pilots annually over the past decade (FAA, 2017). The increase in the number of commercial aircraft and the limited output of qualified pilots 15 means the commercial aviation industry is in the middle of a growing labor shortage (Higgins et al, 2014), which means we need to attract and train more new pilots to maintain our passenger airline system. Using a one-question, open-ended, online survey instrument, this research attempts to provide information that could help collegiate aviation programs identify how current student-pilots became interested in piloting as a career path. This information can help recruiters and enrollment managers optimize resources by focusing on more common “points of exposure” that have been fruitful in the past, and more interesting is the potential to use the responses to identify novel ways to recruit student-pilots into the aviation industry