Now, airlines to go slow on expat pilots

NEW DELHI: Instead of hiring expat pilots and paying exorbitant salaries, India may soon be sending its own pilots to fly foreign airlines.

Indian airline companies are getting ambitious; they not only want to bridge the supply gap in the domestic market but also want to train manpower in huge numbers so that the surplus is recruited by foreign airlines.

For instance, India’s largest private airline Jet Airways is in the process of creating a large pool of pilots to serve the domestic as well as international markets. Other airlines like SpiceJet plans to stop hiring expat pilots from 2008-end while Deccan is already taking steps to reduce their intake of foreign pilots.

Says Jet Airways chairman Naresh Goyal: “We want to create a large pool of pilots to meet our needs and those of foreign airlines such as British Airways or Lufthansa. If our bankers and computer engineers can be hired by foreign companies, why not our pilots?”

Jet Airways has tied up with Brussels-based pilot training school, Sabena Flight Academy, to train 200 pilots every year. Mr Goyal says his company will bear the entire cost of training pilots. Of late, there’s been immense interest from Indian students wanting to become pilots.

Sabena Academy, which trains students from across the globe, had 250 students from India of the total 450 that was enrolled in 2006. In view of the booming aviation sector and consequent rise in the demand for pilots, several training schools have come up in India. Most of these schools send trainees to the US, Europe or South East Asia for training.

Most Indian airlines, such as Deccan and Kingfisher, are entering into strategic tie ups with international training schools, part financing some part of the training programme of pilot aspirants. Deccan, for instance, is looking at sharing training time with another international airline to bring down costs.

Matters will ease as airlines start getting their own training simulators in the country from 2008 onwards. Both SpiceJet and Deccan have already started programmes for reducing dependence on expat pilots. “We have a three-year plan in place for pilot requirement and training. If things go as planned, by 2008 we will not hire fresh expat pilots,’’ SpiceJet VP (HR) Surajit Banerjee told ET.

Deccan’s plan is to gradually reduce its dependence on expat pilots over a two-three year period. “Even as we increase the Airbus fleet size in the coming months, we want to keep the proportion of expat pilots at around 50% and gradually increase the number of Indian pilots in the pool,” said Deccan’s head of pilot training Wilm Reinhard.

The ministry of civil aviation has already set the ball rolling for an aviation sector Manpower Plan for the next 20 years. The plan-of-action is to create an aviation manpower pool within the country to meet the growing needs of the domestic industry and also position India as an HR sourcing hub globally.