Airbus plans Asia-Pacific “ready to fly” pilot training centres

Despite the pandemic, 550,000 new pilots will be required by commercial airlines in the next two decades and nearly 50% of them will be flying with Asia-Pacific carriers. Airbus aims to play a major role in meeting demand for new pilots by opening ab initio training centres in the region. Associate editor and chief correspondent, Tom Ballantyne, reports.

April 13th 2022

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Airbus may be a relative newcomer to the business of ab initio pilot training, only entering the sector in 2019 with flight schools in France and Mexico, but it has big plans for expansion and this year the focus is on the Asia-Pacific. Read More » Airbus Senior Vice President Training and Flights Operations Services, Valerie Manning, told Orient Aviation last month the OEM is supporting the establishment of two ab initio training schools annually and this year the target is the Asia-Pacific.

“How advanced are we? We are looking at different approaches, different schools. There’s nothing fixed, but India is one of the main areas of focus and probably Australia,” she said. China also is being considered for ab initio training courses, but Manning told Orient Aviation she wants to be realistic and have achievable goals.

'China is very strong on evidence-based training with kind of heavier requirements. At the moment, in addition to our training centres we have some agreements or are developing agreements to go in and set up this evidence-based training at airlines [in China]. This is a relatively new area of growth in our training business. It’s not only us. Others are trying to do this. China is a big push here because the CAAC (Civil Aviation Administration of China) has imposed very heavy requirements and we are working there'

Dr Valerie Manning Airbus senior vice president training and flight operations services

“Airbus is not interested in turning out people who can fly a light aircraft. It aims to equip cadets with the skills and mindset to be an “operationally ready pilot”. In other words, when they finish the course they are “airline ready”, ’’she said.

The Airbus training program focuses on the development of key pilot technical and behavioral competencies. It is about setting standards in the market as airlines are growing their fleets post-pandemic.

“It is not to say we are going to take 50% of the [ab initio training] market as we have in large aircraft sales. We know a lot of pilots are needed. We want to help our customers. Let’s set a standard. Let’s go from zero to a hundred in training and really have some ready to fly pilots at the end of their training,” Manning said.

“We want to accompany our airline customers as they expand their fleets and grow their crew. This is where the ab initio view comes in. It is an extension of what we do in type rating and initial and recurrent training.

“Initial training is when we say ‘I am already a pilot, now I need to learn to fly an A320, an A330 and an A350’. Yes, that’s what my organization is known for. But how do you go from zero with someone who says ‘I want to be a pilot’ and from day one you are training them with that in mind. At some point, I am going to be an A320, A330, A350 pilot for Qantas and by the way Qantas, five minutes after you walk in the door, you should have done X, Y and Z. We should be building that in upstream in the training.”

Airbus is not going to train all of the 20,000 pilots needed annually, some 55 a day. “The pandemic forced us or enabled us to accelerate some of our plans, to put in place sectors like ab initio training. It takes about 18 months or more to train someone from ‘what is an airplane?’ to ‘I’m now in the right hand seat of an A320’, or some other aircraft, and to do it properly. To do it so when they have done their training they are ready to go.

“Flying is a fun thing to do,” Manning said, but to prepare somebody to be ready to fly for an airline “is a different animal”. We are trying to do it in a very streamlined way to meet these big needs.”

American-born Manning manages the company’s flight, maintenance, cabin and structure training, its flight simulation business, its Navblue subsidiary and its flight operations engineering, support and training standards. She has had an illustrious career, both in aviation and before joining the industry.

An active instrument-rated pilot and flight instructor in Europe, she graduated from Princeton University with a degree in mechanical & aerospace engineering and earned her Masters and Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University. After working at General Motors as an aerodynamics engineer, Manning became an officer in the U.S. Air Force and served continuously on active duty or in the reserves. She was a consultant with McKinsey & Company and has consulted privately in multidisciplinary optimization and supersonic aircraft design.

While the pandemic is not over, recovery is underway and Manning said one of the major challenges is replacing experienced pilots and engineers who either have retired or have left the industry during the pandemic.

“The issue is either bring back people temporarily out or train new crew. The other option is retraining, up skilling or re-skilling pilots that have been sitting out for a while. We have developed courses that are returning pilots to flying,” she said.

“It is not just about having a pilot or having a mechanic. It is about very skilled people. Some people took retirement or early retirement during the pandemic and those people are generally the most senior people. In the mechanics world it might be a key team leader. In the pilot’s role it is the captain, the left seat pilot. We don’t just need pilots. We need captains.

“Right now, we have a challenge. How do you get them to know what to do in the left seat? We are making a special effort and have started to have very efficient command courses, upgrade courses, to get these people going. Yes, you still need to fly the plane but there are additional things.

“When you’re an Airbus pilot you don’t spend all your time flying the plane. There is a lot of other stuff you do to manage situations. This management aspect is something that was lost a bit during the pandemic.”

Like other aerospace companies, Airbus has worked closely with customers to help them manage the rapidly changing operating environment. “We adapted. Firstly, we kept all our training centres open. Some had nothing to do so they did not need to be open, but when you talk about Miami and Toulouse for Europe and Singapore, we stayed open. We kept our instructors there. They were ready for any customers who did want to train,” she said.

“We also accelerated distance learning, especially on the maintenance side. We had to accelerate the ability to train like we are talking right now (on-line) and find a way of how, especially for mechanics, we can help to sign them off on their exams if nobody’s there? We did everything we could to try to keep things going.”

An important aspect of the work of Manning and her team is defining standards. “Part of what we do is to say this is an aircraft and we have made a modification. Added a heads-up display or a sharklet or X, Y or Z. Part of my role and the role of my team is to say does this thing [modification] require training?” she said.

“Does this change impact the crew or impact the maintenance staff? Yes? No? If so, do we need to change the documentation? Yes? No? Do we need to add training?

“So, I would say not so much has changed during the pandemic but yes, the standard operating procedure, how you interact with the aircraft and all of the tools and what the aircraft does is an important part of training.”

During the pandemic, “we realized that, wow, there was a higher incidence of, for example, takeoffs with unreliable airspeed performance where maybe that takeoff should have been aborted”, she said.

“Why were there more unreliable airspeed situations? Well, there were a lot of airplanes sitting around with bird nests in the wings and the pitot tubes etc. The aircraft talks to you or shows you things. We did a lot of reminding pilots that they were going to face several of these situations that maybe they did not face so much before.

“It’s not that things changed in the cockpit during the pandemic but we had to remind pilots, if not train [them], how to interact with our advanced aircraft. The aircraft does do a lot, let’s be fair. And it does things pilots perhaps had not seen other Thursday and now, maybe, they are seeing more often.”

Airbus recently completed a major update of its Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). “We updated some of them because our cockpits have changed, the aircraft has changed a bit and the operating environment has changed. We would love our customers to follow 100% of our SOPs, but everybody has to customize a little bit. We are trying to reduce the level of customization to 5% to 7%,” she said.

Another developing direction in pilot training is a bigger shift to evidence-based training. Evidence-based training looks at the actual in-service record of pilots and adapts training needs to competencies they must master.

“This is done at the airline, not necessarily at a training centre,” Manning said: “This is now a regulation to move to a type of evidence-based training. We are part of developing this regulation and delivering on these regulations. Each authority is adopting this at different rates.”