Millennials in Aviation

In July 2017 Air France introduced their new ‘sister’ airline Joon. In today’s crowded airline market, Joon had to stand out from the crowd. Their business strategy was focused heavily on appealing to millennials (18 – 35 year olds). They had fancy looking aircraft, with fancy seats, they served organic coffee on board and they offered virtual reality glasses in business class. 

Today, Joon no longer exists. Joon’s business strategy was extremely ambitious. It was a valiant effort; with decent execution but the gamble did not pay off. Why did this very expensive social experiment fail? Evidently, they did not fully understand what millennials are. Did they really think an airline could be viable when targeting a specific age bracket rather than basing their airline on traditional travel economics? 

So what and who are millennials?

Millennials, AKA Generation Y, are often described as people born between 1980 and the mid-1990s. They are tech savvy individuals who understand a world with social media and know what the world was like before social media. I was born in 1989, I am a millennial. 

Why are millennials important to the world?

According to the Pew Research Center, millennials are now the largest generation in the U.S labour force. We are the future of not just the aviation industry, but the whole world. If you are a millennial, the world is counting on you. 

I genuinely believe that today’s aviation leaders underestimate the importance and significance of millennials in the workplace. I have experienced a considerable number of people turn their backs on perfectly suitable aviation career because the company could not adapt to the millennials’ requirements. What really upsets me is when seasoned aviation professionals get forced out of the industry because their superiors do not understand their employee’s cry for change. 

I saw this happening this week. A female power-house aircraft maintenance planning engineer decided enough was enough at the company she worked for. There is nothing wrong with leaving a job, sometimes a person just needs a change. What really upset me was that she was driven out of the aviation industry. All those years of experience, all that knowledge. She is great at what she does and she loves the industry. My gut tells me she will be back but that’s just a fool’s hope. 

She left because the job she was promised was not the job she was doing. She did not leave because she wanted more money, she left because she longs for a greater challenge. The planning department is severely understaffed and requires a massive amount of expertise – the fact that she said she needed a bigger challenge just continued to highlight the need for better management. Her EXACT words were: 

‘Gabe, when I punch out from work, I do not feel like I made a difference’

 I imagine the above phrase as being the Millennial’s slogan – ‘I want to make a difference’. 

How can aviation managers organise their departments to create an environment where their staff feel like they made a difference?

My answer to the above are the highlighted words in the following few paragraphs. This is my experience:

I used to work 24 hours a day, day in, day out, as part of the Maintenance Operations Control (MOC) team for a business aviation company. For whoever does not know what MOC is: it is basically the person the crew contacts when their aircraft doesn’t seem to be behaving correctly. 

MOC in business aviation is mad. Work was relentless, jumping from one issue to another. Apart from the countless hours in the office, one week in every three, after work we had to divert the department calls to our mobile and monitor the department emails. The emails and calls never stopped. Oh, and I was drastically underpaid (but that did not really bother me). 

Looking back, I was over-stressed, overweight and underpaid but I would have done everything for that company. Why?

1.    I loved that I was so involved in the day to day running of the aircraft operation,

2.    I loved my colleagues,

3.    I loved that I had a voice in the company,

4.    I loved the start-up atmosphere,

5.    I was inspired by the company’s accountable manager. It was the first time I worked for such a charismatic, eccentric, ‘crazy’, risk taker, gut trusting guy. He was so unpredictable. He knew what to say and when to say it. He knew how to rally his troops to deliver on some ridiculous goal he set his sights on. The plan is to write another blog about these mad kings of aviation organisations.

With the above in mind, you would think that my superior had cracked the answer to the above question. No way! He had no idea what was going on in the department. We were a group of 3 millennials – Loic, Nicolas and myself – that decided to run the department how we saw fit. Our manager used to help us out with the technical aspects but, the organisation of the department was up to us. We had an unwritten understanding that the department was only going to be successful if we emphasized:

1. Team-work,
2. Honesty,
3. Team-work,
4. Fun (which meant plenty of food and beer),
5. And more Team-work.

We were flexible. We would fight between us on who was going to take the evening shift. If I was on night duty and had an Aircraft on Ground (AOG – when an aircraft develops a technical issue and cannot fly until it is solved) at 8 pm after a long ass day, the others would stay with me till the early hours of the next day. And I would gladly do the same. FYI – this happened very often. 

We always used to get the job done and I genuinely felt that I made a difference. It was an awesome feeling!

So, why did I quit?

This is where good management would have made a difference. I only lasted 1.5 years (the three of us lasted around the same time). If our superior had realised that we were being pushed too far he could have made arrangements to ensure the working conditions were more sustainable. 

The 3 am calls and the long office hours took a toll on both myself and my soon-to-be wife. I was over-stressed and I made a decision when I was angry. Do I regret it? Sometimes. Would I go back in time to change it? Definitely Not. Everything happens for a reason, and that decision has made me who I am today.

Concluding opinion *finally*: Aviation manager and leaders have to accept that millennials are rarely ever loyal to an organisation. Millennials want to make a difference. They are ready to work their butts off for a leader they look up to and/or for colleagues they admire. 

Remember Joon, it never stood a chance. Millennials are so much more than organic coffee, fancy aircraft and shiny objects. Love us or hate us, we are the future and we are ready to make a difference – just give us a chance!