Pilot training scenario in India
The Indian market for air travel has witnessed rapid growth, and has seen new entrants grow rapidly in the last 5 years. Pilot training in India has seen various levels and scenarios. In the organised space, it started with the establishment of Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Uran Akademi, at Rae Bareli in UP.
It was launched when there were only national airlines and hence demand was limited and accordingly capacity was established. The Indian market then witnessed a boom in the aviation industry and formation of many institutes and flying clubs, with limited facilities and old aircraft.
Also, limited knowledge of selecting a pilot training institute coupled with heavy advertising of overseas flying clubs, a lot of students started going overseas. It was only mid way during the course that the students realised, what they were receiving was only flying and not a license course preparation or a license valid for flying in India.
This led to a lot of discontentment amongst the students and the situation only got worse with excessive admissions in Indian flying clubs and students taking over 2 years for completing their flying. This has created a huge demand for qualified aviation professionals.
Despite the current slowdown, India needs approximately 600 pilots every year. Internationally, the airline industry like Etihad, Qatar, Emirates continue to grow and projections show that there is a requirement of 19,000 pilots over the next 4 years, as against the availability of 16,000 pilots, thus creating a huge gap.
While the pilots retirement age has been increased from 60 years to 65 years by several civil aviation regulators, this is only to “fill the gap” and not the best practice.
The following factors also need to be considered:
* Global demand supply mismatch of pilots, yawing gap of 3,000 pilots year on year.
* 30% of the current pilots deployed by commercial airlines in India being expats and would eventually be replaced by Indian pilots
* Robust growth on the horizon in International and domestic cargo segment.
* Absence of quality and corporate pilot training school in India.
Only weeks ago due to the unprecedented rise in fuel costs, analysts were predicting doom for the airline industry. Today, crude oil is over 60% less than it was just over three months ago and the price of jet fuel is about what it was in early 2007. In anticipation of lower demand, every major airline reduced capacity starting with the current Q4 2008.
W.r.t training in 2009, students have become more conscious of quality standards and now they have witnessed that placements won’t be a cake walk and that’s true whether the industry is booming or facing recession as pilot training is a highly regulated training module.
The emphasis on quality would lead to bigger tie-ups and collaboration as now every academy would like to prepare global pilots (de-risk domestic recession). 2008 witnessed the establishment of CAA, India’s largest & most modern integrated academy training global pilots. Gondia academy in tie-up with CAE is another example of focus on global standards.
06/01/09 Sify