Airmen are one of the most important resources in the air transport industry. They are qualified and professional workforce certificated by the civil aviation authority in every country. These kinds of certificated workforce include pilots for civil air transport and general aviation, air traffic controllers, dispatchers, maintenance engineers, and ground machinists in Taiwan. In particular, the manpower requirement for pilots represents the scale of the air transport market in one country and concerns the certification affairs operated by the civil aviation authority. An appropriate workforce demand forecast model can assist the authority in realizing the future development of the whole aviation industry. This study aims to analyze the demand trends of airmen in Taiwan and proposes forecast models to predict the future manpower requirement of pilots in civil air transport. Based on limited samples published in the official reports, this study applied the grey theory to construct GM(1,1) models to predict all pilots, pilots in international airlines, and pilots in regional airlines. These models were evaluated as of good forecasting abilities. The major contribution of this work is to propose a pilot prediction model without a large number of samples. We also found that GM (1, N) model would be more suitable for pilot manpower demand forecast in fleets expansion than other GM models.

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K. Ye, H. Lu and W. Chao, “Grey forecast models of manpower demand for pilots in Taiwan,” International Journal of Applied and Physical Sciences, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 85-93, 2016.