AIRWAYS AVIATION

Indian aviation is growing with leaps and bounds with increasing demand of trained professionals. This has also created interest for global training organizations to either venture or enhance their presence in the country. With having presence in over 10 countries, ALVES Alexandre, Global Chief Operating & Commercial Officer, Airways Aviation Academy beliefs that the growth rate of India is so fast that there will be constraints finding all the qualified professionals. In an exclusive interview with Vishal Kashyap, Managing Editor, Aviation World, he shares his plans for India. Excerpts...

Q: Brief us about the global presence of Airways Aviation and what all course does it provides?

A: Airways Aviation currently operates directly in 10 countries: Australia, India, Lebanon, Turkey, UAE, Germany, France, Montenegro, Italy and Senegal. Our Lebanese operation is expanding now to Cyprus and we are about to enter Portugal, Cabo Verde and Morocco with new operations. We are also expanding into Hainan in China with a local partner.

We have different levels of schools if we can call it like that. The entry-level is a Foundation School, which is what we have opened in Hyderabad last year. There we provide a proper airline-focused assessment, focusing not only on standard skills such as Math's, Physics and English but also pilot skills using ADAPT from Symbiotic which gives us a psychological and psychometric evaluation of the candidate.

After that we provide our own Foundation Course which is what we can call a non-certified PPL theory course, and after that we are in a very good condition to tell the candidates if he can or not invest their time and money in pursuing their career as pilots. Once they pass successfully, we guide them to our next level of schools where we provide commercial pilot training.

In addition, in our fully-fledged academies we provide also cabin crew, maintenance technician and ground services courses. Examples of our main academies that cover the full scope are Australia and France.

Q: How is the response to the Hyderabad training Centre in India and when it started?