Europe’s flight trainer plans facility in India

New Delhi: Driven by the aviation boom in India, GCAT Flight Academy, one of the largest flight training schools in the world in terms of customers, proposes to begin operations in India, a market that has been expanding rapidly for three years and is ranked next only to China, two Swedish government officials, who did not wish to be named, said.
At present it has training centres located in London, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Oslo, Riga and Hong Kong.
The academy was created by merging Sweden-based SAS Flight Academy and the UK-based GECAT, two companies which were recently acquired by a leading European investment fund, STAR Capital Partners Ltd.
GCAT Flight Academy is the largest flight-training organization in Europe and the third largest in the world with 340 customers. It owns 40 commercial full flight simulators for long range, regional and helicopter aircraft types, and also offers a range of other training equipment for pilot, cabin crew and maintenance training.
“With STAR Capital Partner’s investment, we will accelerate our growth plans in pilot training…,” Brian Simpson, chief executive of GCAT Flight Academy, had said earlier at the time of merging the two academies.
Some of GCAT’s current training partners include Aero Madrid, Air Canada, BMI, Cathay Pacific, China Eastern, Lufthansa Flight Training, SAS, Shandong Airlines and Swiss Aviation Training.
02/11/07 Utpal Bhaskar & Tarun Shukla/Hindustan Times