Visits to its careers page increased to more than 28,500 across both episodes during the two hours in which they were broadcast compared to typical user figures of 7,000 visits for a similar two hour period.
The number of woman registering interest in its Amy Johnson initiative has also risen substantially. The last episode of the series was broadcast on Monday evening on ITV 1.
easyJet’s head of flight operations Brian Tyrell said: “I am delighted to see so many people were inspired by the show resulting in record visits to our careers pages and an increased number of actual applications.
“We were approached by ITN Productions to make a programme about the recruitment and training of our pilots and were keen to showcase the process involved and I hope viewers now have a greater understanding of how stringent and demanding our training is as well as the sacrifices and dedication needed in pursuing what is, for most, a dream career.
“The show gave us a unique opportunity to not only show the professionalism of our pilots and operation but also with a heavy emphasis on the work we are doing to increase the number of female pilots, it showcased how we are leading the industry with our female pilot initiatives.”
easyJet’s Amy Johnson Flying Initiative aims to tackle an industry wide stereotype – by 2020, 20% of its entrant cadets will be female having already doubled it over the last two years.
Only 3% of commercial airline pilots worldwide are female and only 450 of them have achieved the rank of captain. In the year ending September 2015, women made up 6% of easyJet’s new pilot intake and 5% of its total pilot community.
In October 2015 easyJet launched its Amy Johnson Flying Initiative with the aim of doubling the number of female new entrant pilots to 12% over two years. It achieved that target in 12 months and the airline has now set itself a more stretching target of ensuring that 20% of new entrant cadet pilots recruited by easyJet in 2020 are female.
Based on current recruitment plans this would mean that easyJet would be recruiting around 50 female pilots a year.
easyJet currently employs over 3,000 pilots and earlier this year, in its largest pilot recruitment drive, easyJet opened a campaign called For the love of Flying to attract up to 450 new pilots.
