RCAF Eases Medical Requirements to Avoid Pilot Shortage

This article was last updated on April 16, 2022

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Canada’s air force has chosen to ease its minimum requirement of medical standards, like desired vision and hearing, in order to cope with a critical shortage of experienced pilots. Record shows that The Royal Canadian Air Force began struggling to retain its trained military pilots since quite a while, which are mainly tasked to fly its fighter jets, search-and-rescue aircraft and helicopters. And now an enlarging “experience gap” has made the situation even worse.

According to a spokesperson of the RCAF, Maj. James Simiana, the gap’s roots go as back as the 1990s, when the Chretien government announced to reduce almost one-third of the military’s ranks and put a freeze on new hiring. In addition to that, the problem worsened in recent years by increased staffing of military fliers by civilian airlines, along with a mass exodus of baby boomers due to retirement. Simiana revealed in an email that “the RCAF has sufficient pilot recruits and pilots undergoing flying training, but not enough experienced pilots that are required to train new pilots, to mentor less experienced RCAF pilots.”

Consequently, Simiana revealed that the air force does not have any other option but to accept retired RCAF pilots and recruit recently laid-off British military aviators to deal with the shortfall. It was added that “the point here is to show that we’re taking mitigating action to counter a challenging demographic situation.” On the other hand, the deputy commander of RCAF, Maj.-Gen. Michael Hood, wrote in the briefing note that “in the past three years, precedent has been set by granting waivers for the enrolment of several applicants whose medical categories were below the pilot occupation minimum for enrolment.”

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