Aviation: The Pilot Shortage

When the commercial jets flew into service, they made the airline pilot a surplus commodity. Because the airlines could carry many more people much faster, they needed smaller fleets of planes and fewer men to fly them. The lines laid off hundreds of pilots, demoted countless others to lower ranks in the cockpit. Now the situation has made a full turn; for the first time in the annals of peacetime aviation, there is a serious pilot shortage.

TWA says it "desperately needs pilots," recently hired 190 of them, its first newcomers since 1957....