Airlines will need to hire 558,000 pilots in the next 20 years, according to Boeing

Being a pilot is a great job. Not only does it pay well and offer great benefits, but you can't beat the satisfaction of being in command of an enormous flying machine. And soon, pilots' jobs will be more secure than ever. In the next few years, trained aviators are going to become as valuable as solid gold.

According to a Boeing forecast, airlines around the world will need to hire 558,000 new pilots over the next 20 years to keep up with the demand for travel, and to justify their ambitious orders for new planes, which currently total about $5.6 trillion. Did these air carriers bite off more than they can chew? That all depends on whether demand keeps up, and whether enough people are willing to enroll in flight school. And with a need for 28,000 new pilots a year, flight school might not be a bad idea.

In its annual pilot and technician outlook, Boeing predicted that about 40% of the demand for pilots will come from Asia-Pacific countries, because that's the part of the world where the middle class is growing. However, airlines may have trouble meeting demand in that region, because private pilots are rare there. Boeing Flight Services Vice President Sherry Carbary told Bloomberg:

 “People have grown up without little airplanes flying overhead. How do you get that population excited by aviation?”

I have an idea for that: tell them that they'll always have a job if they become a pilot. In my experience, nothing gets people excited like a steady paycheck.