India has never witnessed the growth in aviation sector as it sees know. Although, the dynamic phase has just begun with more private airlines occupying the Indian skies and few of them even started flying off the territory. But, something that worries the Government is shortage of trained pilots and may be that could be the key reason behind the Aviation Ministry pushing hard for implementing the National Flying Institute (NFI) project.Some analysts predicts that India needs anything between 6,000 and 8,000 trained pilots in next ten years to keep pace with the growing fleet strength in the country. Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Uran Akademi (IGRUA), owns by the Government of India at Fursatganj, few hundred kilometers from the national capital, Delhi, is said to be the premier training institute in the country. Although, there are more than 25 flying clubs here, the demand for the trained pilots increases day-by-day.
To know more about the trend, LNNnews.com recently caught up with Mr. R.C. Gupta, Associate Director, Intercontinental Consultants and Technocrats (ICT), a Delhi-based consulting firm. He is one of the consultants closely working on the NFI scheme.
Airports Authority of India (AAI), the nodal agency, which controls over 100 civilian airports in the country, had retained the ICT lead consortium comprising Louis Berger of USA and Austria’s ACV as Global Technical Adviser (GTA) for the NFI project, says Mr. Gupta.
According to Mr. Gupta, ICT has recently submitted the Detailed Project Report (DPR) and started receiving comments from the AAI and the Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and presently waits for Aviation Ministry’s feedback.
The NFI project is likely to be executed in a phased manner, wherein the first phase envisages developing a facility to train 30 pilots per year and which could be extended to 100 per year as the facility gets expanded over the time, says Mr. Gupta. The phase I is expected to go for commercial operation late this year.
A facility of such scale can be built in less than 12 months? Mr. Gupta has answer for this, according to him, the DPR suggest that till infrastructure is created, the training could be given at Manohar Bhai Patel Institute of Engineering & Technology, which is close to the project site, Gondia.
But why Gondia why not other cities? Mr. Gupta feels that Gondia could turn out to be an ideal location as there is already an airport exist and it won’t cost much for the Government as well as there won’t be much ado in ac
