Pilot Training Goes Virtual
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A change in pilot licensing regulations means that more pilots can be trained at once and the industry won’t need any additional aircrafts to carry out the training.
The International Civil Aviation Organization has recently endorsed multi-crew pilot licensing for commercial airline pilots that allows the majority of the training to be done on simulators.
Under the previous regulations students needed to have approximately 150 to 200 hours logged flying in an actual plane and the training could take anywhere from 18 to 26 months. Students training for multi-crew licensing are likely to obtain up to 300 hours worth of flying experience in as little as 45 weeks, and about 70 to 100 hours of this time will still be spent in a real plane. The change could reduce the costs of commercial pilot training by as much as $15,000 to $100,000 in some places.
The new licensing method will not only cut costs, but many claim it will also be more effective. The planes used in traditional training programs were often smaller, such as Cessna 150’s, and didn’t entirely represent what the pilots would experience when flying large jets commercially. Under the new regulations trainees will need to demonstrate their ability to perform specific tasks on a simulator that mimics the types of planes they’ll be flying professionally.
The retirement of older pilots and the constant development of new aircraft technology means there is likely to be a shortage of qualified pilots in the near future. Currently the industry estimates that 15,000 to 18,000 pilots will be needed annually over the next 20 years. Now with an emphasis on simulator training and shorter training times, larger facilities will be able to train 3,000 or more pilots per year.
Simulator manufacturors and training organizations in Canada and the United States are currently setting their sites abroad to places such as China, the Middle East, India and South East Asia. It’s likely that these areas will be the hot spots for multi-crew licensing because they don’t have the infrastructure to support conventional training methods.