Training
ANA’s Thailand flight academy addresses pilot shortage
October 1st 2015
Thailand’s first joint flight training academy is building its reputation as a regional centre for high quality dry time pilot training at its university-based centre in Bangkok. Read More »
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| Bangkok’s Pan Am flight Training Academy has attracted several third party airline customers |
An ANA Holdings subsidiary, Pan Am International Flight Training Academy, is a response to the demand for thousands of new pilots needed in the Asia-Pacific in the next two decades as well as a considered investment by the Japanese aviation holding company.
Opened in September 2013, after ANA Holdings bought the Pan Am Flight Training Academy business, it has established its school in partnership with Thailand’s Assumption University’s department of aviation, the first time Pan Am training has had a training partnership with a university.
The academy operates from Assumption University’s Suvarnabhumi campus, near the city’s major international airport. It is equipped with one Level D A320 and one Level D B737NG simulator and, at this stage, offers dry time training. Three more simulators, another A320 and two B737NGs, are planned to be added to the facility as its enrollments expand.
An academy spokesman, Capt. Greg Darrow, said the Bangkok facility trains up to 10 crews per day. Worldwide, the Pan Am flight training facility has an estimated 3,000 training cycles a year. Apart from providing training for partner airlines, ANA and Nok Air, the centre “has become a preferred training location for six different airlines”, said Darrow.
The academy’s plans for the curriculum include ab initio cadet pilot, cabin crew and airline maintenance training as well as aviation English and air traffic control courses.
“We agree that cadets should experience a traditional flight training ab initio course,” Darrow said when asked by Orient Aviation if he agreed with Boeing’s view that ab initio courses are important for training pilots.
Along with simulator and classroom training, “nothing can substitute for actual cockpit time for initial students”, Darrow said.
Pan Am Flight Training Academy was originally the crew training school for the U.S.’s iconic airline, Pan American World Airlines, which closed in 1991 after 64 years of flying. Under its new ownership, it operates two flight training facilities in Tokyo, the Panda Flight Training Academy and the ANA Flight Training Centre, and Pan Am Flight centres in the U.S, including Kissimmee in Florida.
