Training
Two Indian academies lengthen the multi-engine phase and the queue grows
Saffron and Malabar both hire from schools that have just added three weeks to the course. The cadets are not slower. The aeroplanes they need are.
Leila Okonkwo
Aviation correspondent
Gondia4 min
Briefing
Saffron and Malabar both hire from schools that have just added three weeks to the course. The cadets are not slower. The aeroplanes they need are.
The Gondia school that feeds both Saffron Air and Malabar Regional has added three weeks to the multi-engine phase after a run of checkrides that were legal and, in the words of the head of training, “not yet airline-shaped.” A sister school outside Hyderabad has done the same. The cadets who were due on a line-indoctrination course in November are now due in December.
The bottleneck is the twin itself. One of the school’s multi-engine aircraft is in a shop visit that was supposed to be twenty days and is on day forty-one, for the same reason the fan shops in Cincinnati are late: parts, not mystery. The remaining twin is flying from first light to last. Adding weeks is what you do when you will not thin the syllabus to fit the metal.
“We can graduate them on time or we can graduate them ready,” said head of training Imtiaz Shah. “The airlines have told me, in writing, which of those they will accept. It is the second one. They will complain about the date anyway.”
Saffron’s intake plan still shows the November class. The school’s plan does not. The gap is where Indian pilot supply actually lives this quarter: not in a shortage of people raising their hands, but in a twin that is sitting in a hangar with a cowl open.
