Helping aviation personnel learn the ropes and build skills

In 2006 Kiran Grandhi, then Managing Director, GMR Hyderabad International Airport Limited, overseeing the opening of the new greenfield airport in Hyderabad, was a worried man.

The airport was being built from scratch and there was a desperate need for 500 to 600 trained people to look after its various operations.

PS Nair, then Chief Executive Officer, Hyderabad airport, suggested that the company create its own talent pool. Nair, who had worked for over two decades with airports under AAI across the country before taking early retirement and joining the GMR group, was not only thinking of the new greenfield airport in Hyderabad but also the upcoming Delhi airport modernisation project that GMR had bagged. And that is how the GMR Aviation Academy (AA), the training arm of the GMR group, was born in 2009-10 in Hyderabad with a satellite campus in Delhi airport’s Terminal 2. The GMR group currently run airports in Hyderabad and Delhi and is also involved in Cebu airport in Philippines.

Today, among others, the GMR AA is a Directorate General of Civil Aviation approved training organisation for conducting courses in all categories of DGR training, an IATA accredited training school (ATS) and an IATA authorised training centre.

Among the various courses taught are short term ones like Aviation Security Training (the Academy is a BCAS-accredited security training institute) and the six-month firefighters training course held at a 100-acre campus in Anantpur near Bengaluru. “It is disciplined uniformed police training and post training they are deployed at our airports,” adds Nair.

“We started creating a talent pipeline for critical areas like firefighting. Operating an airport is condition precedent for which you must have minimum number of certified and trained firefighters. We stared the basic six-month FireFighters Course on campus,” Nair says.
16/10/18 Ashwini Phadnis/Business Line