Subcontinental Giant Needs 3,000 Pilots

As the dead hand of 1960s socialism loosens its death-grip on the Indian economy, the country's large area and larger population are creating a large demand for air travel.

Indian airlines project that they'll add 400 airplanes in the next four years -- and that's just passenger lines. India needs cargo and GA too. And in the world's second-most-populous nation an unexpected need has arisen: people!

According to Economic Times of India, The Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation forsees a demand for 3,200 more pilots by 2010.

"If we consider just the new airlines in India today, the demand for pilots in the next four years may reach 3,000 and all flying schools in India pooled together cannot provide these numbers," Capt Mamatha of Flytech Aviation Academy in Hyderabad said. That doesn't account for any growth of the existing Indian airlines, which are not ignoring their upstart competition.

So everybody is trying to get a piece of the exploding training industry. The government is planning to start a new flying school in the Nagpur area, but existing private flight schools in India, like Mamatha's, intend to meet government competition head-on.

The General Manager of Orient Flight School in Pondicherry is Prithvi Nath Sharma. He currently has 60 students enrolled in an ab-initio program, and hopes to double that number. "All our students have been placed across airlines, both in the domestic and international sectors." Sharma told the Economic Times.

Marc Carvalho, CEO, Carver Aviation of Mumbai (Bombay) is similarly fully booked, which in its case is 40-45 students. "All our students have been placed across airlines," CEO Marc Carvalho said.

These Indian ab-initio students earn the equivalent of commercial multi-engine licenses and go to the airlines with about 200 hours of flying time -- recently reduced from 250. "There will be more streamlining in future," Carvalho predicts.

Even flying clubs are being raided by fast-growing airlines. A first officer starts off earning about $1,500 a month (RS 70,000) -- good money in India. And with the lines growing so rapidly, seniority advances rapidly, bringing income with it.

As in the USA or Europe, Indian flight schools need government licenses and approvals to operate. The Indian authority, the Director General of Civil Aviation, has been kept hopping by new start-up schools and schools adding new courses and capacities.

Along with pilots, of course, all the other jobs that are part of commercial aviation need filling. This is especially true of trained mechanics.

Mamatha: "Today, the responsibility of achieving a zero-accident rate in airlines depends not just on pilots, but also on all professionals including those on the ground. Thus, demand for maintenance engineers is also increasing."

With Indian training resources strained to the limit by the lines' hunger for new pilots and mechanics, foreign companies have found profits in the Indian market. The USA is at a disadvantage due to TSA clearance requirements for training and the obstacles to obtaining a training visa. This has created an opportunity for Canadian firms, Cubex and Harv's Air (of Winnipeg) are already training Indian students and CAE is looking at the market.

Aero-News has just carried the story of how IndUS Aviation, a company founded by Indian-American surgeon Dr. Ram Pattisapu, FACS, is planning to capitalize on the boom by building two training acadamies.

"There is an increase in demand for flight training as the country's aviation industry is poised for a boom,"  IndUS Aviation (India)'s Ravi Kiran Kota said.

"The demand for pleasure flying is also gaining ground, and hence the need for more training institutes". IndUS, of course, plans to build its training program around the Thorp T-211 light sport aircraft that it already builds in India and in the USA. IndUS will also start manufacturing 4-seaters, called Model 11E, for the Indian market this year.

So it looks like the Indian market is in for a boom all around, as long as they don't do anything galactically stupid, like import the current crop of American airline executives.

FMI: http://civilaviation.nic.in