Airline News
Airbus and SIA open first A350 training facility in Asia
October 30th 2015
The new Airbus Asia Training Centre (AATC) at Singapore’s Seletar Aerospace Park, the largest Airbus training facility outside Toulouse, is on target for completion in the first three months of 2016, although courses on Asia’s first operational $18 million A350 XWB full flight simulator are available from this month at the nearby Singapore Airlines (SIA) Training Centre. Read More »
The new $100 million AATC facility, a joint venture between Airbus (55%) and SIA (45%), offers type rating and recurrent training courses for all in-production Airbus models. When fully operational, it will be equipped with eight full flight simulators, including three A350 XWBs, one A380, two A330s and two A320s, with the capacity to offer courses for more than 10,000 trainees a year, said its general-manager, Airbus Captain Yann Lardet.
Establishment of the AATC offers a cost advantage for Asia-Pacific carriers who will no longer have to send their crews to Europe for training. Cockpit crew are out of active service for up to a week for a standard recurrent training course, taking extended rest and travel periods into account. Nine Asia-Pacific carriers trained crews at AATC, including SIA, Qantas Airways, Virgin Australia, Bangkok Airways, Cebu Pacific, Philippine Airlines, Lion Air, Fiji Airways and Kuwait Airways.
Typically, it takes about five to ten days for a pilot currently flying an Airbus variant to receive type rating for the A350. Conversion for pilots trained on Boeing fleets requires about 25 days.
The AATC, which mainly draws its instructor pool from Airbus and retired SIA cockpit crew, comes to the region in time to meet a projected 5.7% annual growth in passenger numbers, with demand for 12,740 new passenger and freight aircraft, valued at $2 trillion through to 2034, to arrive in the region. This translates into an increase the region’s flight crew population from around 64,000 today to more than 120,000 in two decades.
This, in turn, will fuel the demand for pilot and other training centres, Capt Lardet said, as airlines look to outsourcing to avoid high start-up and running costs of in-house facilities.
