Baltic Aviation Academy’s Experts: How to Reduce Pilot Shortage in Asia?
According to recent Boeing’s Pilot and Technician Outlook, Asia Pacific region is expected to have huge demand for aviation personnel by the year 2030 – nearly 430,000 people. This number includes 185,600 new pilots and 243,500 technicians. Boeing estimates that as much as 34 000 new planes will be produced by that time and nearly 40% of those will be flying in Asia. Airbus expects delivery of more than 9 000 new aircrafts to Asian airlines in the next 20 years.
To keep up with growing air transportation demand in the region, airlines are expanding their fleet and facing the questions how to prepare aviation personnel effectively. As a result, at Asia Pacific Airline Training Symposium (APATS) 2012, which took place on 28-29th August in Singapore, Baltic Aviation Academy overviewed the pros and cons of establishing airlines’ own training organization (TO) or type rating training organization (TRTO) versus outsourcing aviation training services to external service provider.
Characteristics of in-house pilot and cabin crew training:
| Pros | Cons |
| Might be less expensive in a long run | More expensive in a short run |
| Easier to control the training process | Lack of expertise in a start-up |
| Ability to set your own standards for all trainees | Certain quality issues in the beginning |
| Faster communication chain | Training business management skills needed (Training regulations, certifications, organization, flying instructors schedule management, dealing with human factor, income and expenditure balance, etc.) |
| Higher level of flexibility in training procedures | Outsourced training is quicker (paid for results) |
Baltic Aviation Academy experts emphasize that self-owned training centers usually are more beneficial to bigger airlines, with huge flow of pilots and cabin crew, who require constant recurrent training. Oppositely, outsourcing in general might be more beneficial to small ones (e.g. start-up’s) as well to those, whose business model is based on saving costs, such as low-cost and charter airlines.
“Baltic Aviation Academy’s proposed conditions for establishing an airlines’ own training or type rating training organization would be more than years experience in the market, experienced instructing personnel (at least 3000 hours experience on certain aircraft type), air company’s size and growth, cultural hierarchy and strength of unions in the country, and an ability to build a strong management team”, told Vytis Zalimas, Executive Business Developer for South Asia at Baltic Aviation Academy and speaker at Asia Pacific Aviation Symposium 2012.
Relying on data provided by International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), Asia-Pacific region cannot keep up with the pilot demand projections for 2030. In order to do that, number of new pilots trained each year has to increase by nearly 10,000. That is the biggest shortage in whole world. In Europe, approximately 7 600 new pilots have to be trained each year in order to meet future demand. Situation in Latin America, Africa and Middle East is more promising – 4,305, 2,804 and 1,598 new pilots respectively have to be trained each year. So far only North America is exceeding future standards, having a surplus of 17 206 freshly trained pilots each year.