Time Machine

Airline pilots

Name: Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers: employment and wages since 1926
Creator: Future History
License: https://futurehistory.earth/terms

Official title Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers (SOC 53-2011)

Also called Commercial airline pilot, First officer, Captain, Copilot, Flight engineer

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 103,560 US airline pilots, with median pay of $232,140 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the May 2025 count is the highest. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 6,000 from 1926, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for airline pilots: Tablet flight-planning apps, 2009 to 2024.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 8.3% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

22.7% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.

Last updated 11 October 2026.

Cite this page

APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Airline pilots: jobs and pay since 1926 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-2011

Chicago

Future History. "Airline pilots: jobs and pay since 1926." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-2011.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_53_2011, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Airline pilots: jobs and pay since 1926}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-2011}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time

1925195019752000now

2026

Known then as Air Mail Pilot / Aviator (U.S. Post Office airmail era)

Known then as Air Transport Pilot / Co-pilot / Flight Engineer (licensed, piston-airliner era)

Known then as Airline Captain / First Officer / Flight Engineer (jet age, three-person cockpit)

Known then as Airline Pilot / Co-pilot (glass-cockpit, two-person crew era)

Known then as Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers (BLS SOC 53-2011)

Known today as Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers (BLS SOC 53-2011)

Projected to still be called Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers (BLS SOC 53-2011)

Data from the May 2025 survey

US Employment

104K

Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic

Report an error

Median Annual Wage

$232,140

Est.

≈ $226,188 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic

Report an error

Beat · 1918

May 15, 1918: the U.S. Post Office launches scheduled airmail service between Washington and New York, and within two years extends it coast to coast. Flying the mail is the first steady professional flying job in America, and a deadly one: through the 1920s roughly one in six airmail pilots is killed navigating by landmarks and beacon fires in open-cockpit biplanes. This cadre of airmail aviators is the seed of the airline pilot profession.

Beat · 1926

May 20, 1926: the Air Commerce Act becomes law, directing the Secretary of Commerce to license pilots and aircraft for the first time. The first Air Commerce Regulations, issued December 31, 1926, classify pilots as commercial or private, giving the professional airline pilot a federal legal identity. The Air Mail Act of 1925 had already begun handing mail routes to private carriers, turning airmail aviators into airline pilots as those carriers added passengers.

Beat · 1931

July 27, 1931: David L. Behncke and 23 other pilots found the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) in Chicago. ALPA would become one of the most effective labor unions in the country, bargaining hard on pay, scheduling, and safety, and shaping the seniority-based pay structure that still defines airline pilot careers. The union's safety advocacy would prove as consequential as its wage gains over the following century.

Beat · 1958

October 26, 1958: Pan Am begins regular Boeing 707 service, opening the jet age. The early 707 carries a four-person flight crew, pilot, copilot, navigator, and flight engineer, and the airline captain becomes one of the most glamorous and best-paid jobs in America. Over the next three decades, automation will steadily empty that cockpit: inertial navigation will remove the navigator, and the glass cockpit will remove the flight engineer.

Beat · 1978

The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 ends federal control of airline routes and fares. It reshapes the profession profoundly: airline-industry employment, roughly flat before deregulation, grows about 2% per year from 1978 to 1994 as new carriers enter and traffic expands, but competition and later bankruptcies put lasting downward pressure on pilot pay and job security. The seniority lock-in that ties a pilot's pay to one carrier becomes a defining career risk in a deregulated, bankruptcy-prone industry.

Beat · 1989

The Boeing 747-400 enters service: outwardly the same jumbo jet, but with the flight engineer's station gone. Its cockpit drops from roughly 971 controls to about 365 through digital electronics, and two pilots now do what three once did. The 747-400 is the symbolic end of the three-person airline cockpit; the flight engineer position disappears across the fleet as three-crew aircraft retire through the 1990s.

Beat · 2007

The FAA raises the mandatory pilot retirement age from 60 to 65, deferring a looming wave of captain retirements. The move eases an impending shortage for several years but does not eliminate it: the deferred cliff arrives in the 2020s, when a large cohort of pilots hired in earlier booms reaches 65, contributing to the acute post-pandemic pilot shortage and the hiring-and-pay surge of 2022-2024.

Beat · 2025

European regulators pause their single-pilot and extended-minimum-crew research, concluding that current technology cannot match the safety of a two-pilot crew. Combined with the US two-pilot mandate, the pause is the clearest signal that the cockpit's two remaining seats are durable for the foreseeable future: a century of automation removed the navigator and the flight engineer, but the regulatory floor of two qualified pilots has held, and AI tools are augmenting planning and monitoring rather than replacing the crew.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

How it began · 1918

The job of flying other people's cargo and passengers for a living began with the mail. On May 15, 1918, the U.S. Post Office launched scheduled airmail service between Washington and New York, and within two years had strung a transcontinental route from New York to San Francisco. Flying it was lethal work: through the 1920s roughly one in six airmail pilots was killed on the job, navigating by railroad tracks, river bends, and bonfires lit along the route, in open-cockpit biplanes with no radio and few instruments. Charles Lindbergh flew the St. Louis to Chicago mail run for Robertson Aircraft before his 1927 transatlantic flight made him famous, and he was typical of the breed: young, fearless, and improvising a profession that did not yet have rules. The rules arrived with the Air Commerce Act of 1926, which directed the Secretary of Commerce to license pilots and aircraft for the first time, classifying airmen as commercial or private and giving the airline transport pilot a legal identity. As the Air Mail Act of 1925 handed mail routes to private carriers, companies like Western Air Express, Ford Air Transport, and Pan American began carrying paying passengers alongside the mail, and the airmail aviator became the airline pilot. In 1931 the pilots organized, founding the Air Line Pilots Association in Chicago to fight for pay and safety. Over the century that followed, the cockpit would fill with crew, then empty again as machines absorbed their work: a navigator and a flight engineer joined the two pilots in the piston and early jet era, the navigator vanished with inertial navigation, the flight engineer with the glass cockpit, and what remained, two pilots in front of a wall of screens, has held firm against every prediction that the seat would soon be empty.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace airline pilots? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say

Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

→ 2035

+8.3%

BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 53-2011 (Airline pilots, copilots, and flight engineers): 104.6 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 113.3 thousand in 2035, a change of +8.7 thousand (+8.3%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers. The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.

Official statisticReport an error

How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)

Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.

Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"

2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)

22.7%

of tasks

What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 53-2011.00 Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers. Shown: human-rated β = 0.227, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.455; GPT-4-rated β 0.352. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error

Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for airline pilots

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereFile instrument flight plans with ATC, compute weight-and-balance using Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) tools, and confirm fuel loads match dispatch release before accepting the aircraft for departure.

File instrument flight plans with ATC, compute weight-and-balance using Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) tools, and confirm fuel loads match dispatch release before accepting the aircraft for departure.^[6]

Tools picking this up

ForeFlight Mobile ↗Garmin Pilot ↗

Where your edge is

Retain manual W&B calculation skills; EFB software can silently carry incorrect aircraft configuration data, and the PIC bears legal responsibility for every departure weight regardless of tool output.

AI is sitting alongside you hereEvaluate AI-generated trajectory optimization suggestions from tools like Thales FlytOptim or Honeywell Forge Flight Efficiency, approve or modify proposed vertical path changes for fuel savings, then coordinate with ATC to execute.

Evaluate AI-generated trajectory optimization suggestions from tools like Thales FlytOptim or Honeywell Forge Flight Efficiency, approve or modify proposed vertical path changes for fuel savings, then coordinate with ATC to execute.^[7],[8]

Tools picking this up

Thales FlytOptim ↗Honeywell Forge Performance+ ↗

Where your edge is

Treat optimization outputs as advisory: learn to recognize when wind-model lag or ATC congestion makes the algorithm's suggestion impractical, and document rejections to improve future system accuracy.

AI is sitting alongside you hereComplete post-flight documentation: digital flight logs, fuel burn actuals, MEL items discovered in flight, and passenger incident reports via airline operations platform, feeding data back into airline analytics systems.

Complete post-flight documentation: digital flight logs, fuel burn actuals, MEL items discovered in flight, and passenger incident reports via airline operations platform, feeding data back into airline analytics systems.^[1]

Where your edge is

Write accurate, factual incident narratives; vague entries reduce the value of airline safety databases and can leave pilots personally exposed if a follow-on investigation reveals a gap between the report and the event.

Where airline pilots go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

Transportation, Storage, and Distribution Managers
US median pay
$107,230 (May 2025)
BLS outlook 2025-35
+6.1%
Air Traffic ControllersNo timeline for this role yet
Aviation InspectorsNo timeline for this role yet

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Transportation, Storage, and Distribution Managers

Transportation, Storage, and Distribution Managers oversee logistics networks, a role where deep operational knowledge of aviation constraints (ETOPS, weight-and-balance, dangerous goods rules) translates to credibility and early promotion. Airlines and cargo operators actively recruit senior captains into Director of Operations and Director of Flight Standards roles. The management layer is more AI-resilient than line flying.

What you'd add

· MBA or transportation management graduate coursework
· Airline Operations Control Center (AOCC) dispatch and irregular operations experience
· Fleet planning and scheduling software (Jeppesen Crew Pairing, Sabre AirCentre)
· FAR Part 119 Director of Operations certificate of authority

What it takesSome new skills to pick up

Tools of the era

How has the work of airline pilots changed since 1918?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

Open-cockpit airmail flying (visual navigation, no radio, lighted airways)
The first professional flying job had almost no tools. Airmail pilots flew open-cockpit biplanes navigating by landmarks, railroad lines, and beacon bonfires, with no cockpit instruments for blind flight and no radio link to the ground. The pilot's entire toolkit was embodied: dead-reckoning navigation, weather judgment from the seat, and raw stick-and-rudder skill. Survival depended on the pilot, not the machine, which is why roughly one in six airmail pilots died on the job in the early years.
Effect on the work
The extreme fatality rate and the skill bar created a small, elite, self-selecting cadre of professional aviators out of which the airline pilot profession formed.
Instrument flight + gyroscopic autopilot + radio navigation (piston-airliner era)
Through the 1930s and 1940s the cockpit filled with instruments that let pilots fly through cloud and at night: the artificial horizon, the gyrocompass, and radio range navigation. The gyroscopic autopilot, demonstrated by Sperry decades earlier, matured into a system that could hold heading and altitude on long legs, easing pilot workload on transcontinental and transoceanic routes. The piston airliners of this era (DC-3, DC-6, Constellation) typically carried a four-person crew: two pilots, a navigator to fix position over oceans, and a flight engineer to manage the complex engines and systems.
Jet age + inertial navigation (three- and four-person cockpit)
The Boeing 707 entered service with Pan Am in October 1958 and launched the jet age. Early long-haul jets carried four crew: captain, first officer, navigator, and flight engineer. Inertial navigation systems, which arrived in airliners in the late 1960s, computed position without ground references and made the human navigator redundant, removing the first of the cockpit's extra seats. The flight engineer remained, hands on a wall of analog gauges and switches, managing fuel, hydraulics, pressurization, and electrical systems while the two pilots flew and communicated.
Effect on the work
Inertial navigation eliminated the airline navigator position over the 1960s and 1970s, the first cockpit crew role automated out of existence. The flight engineer survived this era but was next in line.
Glass cockpit + FMS (two-person crew, flight engineer eliminated)
The glass cockpit ended the flight engineer. The Flight Management System (FMS) let two pilots program and fly a full route profile that previously needed three sets of hands.
Effect on the work
The glass cockpit eliminated the flight engineer position across the airline fleet through the 1980s and 1990s as three-crew aircraft retired, removing the cockpit's third seat permanently. The two-pilot crew that remained has proven the durable floor.
Electronic Flight Bag + RNAV/RNP precision navigation
The Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) replaced the pilot's heavy paper-chart kit bag with a tablet computer holding approach plates, performance calculators, and weight-and-balance tools, and major carriers rolled it out through the 2000s and early 2010s. Area-navigation (RNAV) and required-navigation-performance (RNP) procedures let aircraft fly precise satellite-defined paths rather than tracking ground beacons, tightening the pilot's navigation task while shifting more of it onto programmed automation. The job became less about manual navigation and more about correctly programming and supervising the machine that navigated.
Tablet flight-planning apps (ForeFlight 2009, Garmin Pilot 2012)
ForeFlight, launched in 2009, and Garmin Pilot, launched in 2012, put a full preflight planning suite on a cockpit iPad: aggregated weather (METARs, TAFs, SIGMETs), NOTAMs, route and fuel computation, and direct electronic flight-plan filing. For the airline pilot these consumer-grade apps complemented airline dispatch systems and made self-briefing far faster, automating the laborious manual gathering of weather and notices that once consumed much of preflight preparation. The pilot's judgment moved up a level: from collecting the data to interpreting an aggregated brief.
AI trajectory optimization + predictive maintenance (Thales FlytOptim, Honeywell Forge)
The current frontier is AI in the operational loop rather than the control loop. Thales FlytOptim, deployed from 2024, uses AI prediction on live weather and aircraft-mass data to compute fuel-optimal vertical paths and sends an alternative trajectory to the cockpit for the crew to approve and fly. Honeywell Forge combines flight-efficiency analytics with predictive engine-health monitoring, surfacing component anomalies before a flight rather than after a failure. These tools augment the pilot's planning and monitoring; they do not touch the legally mandated act of two qualified humans flying the aircraft.
Effect on the work
AI augmentation here changes how pilots plan and monitor, not how many pilots are required. The binding constraint on headcount is regulatory (the two-pilot mandate), not the capability of the optimization tools.

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Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers employment and pay by year

On record since1918

Latest US employment103,560 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Latest US median pay$232,140 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Outlook+8.3% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

View all 26 years of cited US data, each linked to its source

Year	US employment	Annual pay (median unless marked)	Source	Report
1926	6,000	n/a	Est., FAA Researched context	Report
1958	35,000	$20,000	Est., Britannica (employment) Researched contextEst., Pan Am Historical Foundation (pay) Researched context	Report
2000	94,820	n/a	BLS OEWS 2000 Official statistic	Report
2003	79,770	n/a	BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statistic	Report
2004	78,490	n/a	BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statistic	Report
2005	76,240	n/a	BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statistic	Report
2006	75,810	n/a	BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statistic	Report
2007	78,250	$103,590	BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statistic	Report
2008	77,090	$111,680	BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statistic	Report
2009	74,420	$106,240	BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statistic	Report
2010	68,580	$103,210	BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statistic	Report
2011	68,350	$105,580	BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statistic	Report
2012	66,270	$114,200	BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statistic	Report
2013	73,030	$115,190	BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statistic	Report
2014	75,760	$118,140	BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statistic	Report
2015	81,350	$117,290	BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statistic	Report
2016	81,520	$127,820	BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statistic	Report
2017	84,070	$137,330	BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statistic	Report
2018	82,890	$140,340	BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statistic	Report
2019	84,520	$147,220	BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statistic	Report
2020	83,550	$160,970	BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statistic	Report
2021	81,310	$202,180	BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statistic	Report
2022	89,580	$211,790	BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statistic	Report
2023	93,670	$219,140	BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statistic	Report
2024	99,300	$226,600	BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statistic	Report
2025	103,560	$232,140	BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statistic	Report

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See all roles in Transportation

Where airline pilots go next

Transportation, Storage, and Distribution Managers

Open-cockpit airmail flying (visual navigation, no radio, lighted airways)Open-cockpit airmail flying1918–1930

Instrument flight + gyroscopic autopilot + radio navigation (piston-airliner era)Instrument flight + gyroscopic autopilo…1930–1958

Jet age + inertial navigation (three- and four-person cockpit)Jet age + inertial navigation1958–1985

Glass cockpit + FMS (two-person crew, flight engineer eliminated)Glass cockpit + FMS1985–2000

Electronic Flight Bag + RNAV/RNP precision navigationElectronic Flight Bag + RNAV/RNP precis…2000–2015

Tablet flight-planning apps (ForeFlight 2009, Garmin Pilot 2012)Tablet flight-planning apps2009–2024

AI trajectory optimization + predictive maintenance (Thales FlytOptim, Honeywell Forge)AI trajectory optimization + predictive…2024–present

Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers employment and pay by year

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