Air India inducts 44 new pilots

Mumbai: Air India has inducted 44 new pilots, taking their strength at the state-owned carrier to 1,244. The new pilots trained at Air India’s own training school, Central Training Establishment (CTE) in Hyderabad, were inducted after they cleared the CTE tests. The airline boom in India has left the country with an acute shortage of trained pilots. Carriers were allowed to hire foreign pilots and medically fit pilots above the age of 60. According to industry estimates, of the 3,000 pilots in India, 600 are foreign pilots.
The country will need as many as 10,000 pilots by 2020 as carriers scale up their capacities. Experts feel the country will still be short of trained pilots as the gene-pool of pilots is shrinking faster than it is growing.
11/06/08 TravelBizMonitor