Russia’s answer to silicon valley could be teaming up with US plane maker Boeing to set up a flight school to breach the country’s huge pilot shortfall.
The school will be set up as a part of the space cluster of the
Skolkovo Techno Park and will provide higher qualification
courses for pilots, the daily Vedomosti quotes sources in the
Ministry of Transportation.
«Boeing will deliver simulators and possibly other equipment
to the school. Our investments will reach tens of millions of
dollars. It’s difficult to say more precisely, as the project is
being discussed,” Vedomosti quotes a Boeing employee.
The new flying school should help solve Russia’s lack of
qualified pilots. Russian airlines lack up to 1,200 commercial
pilots, says Minister of Transport Maxim Sokolov to the
newspaper. That’s despite Russian pilots’s salaries are higher
than many European airlines and reach 450,000 roubles a month
($14,000). Russia has only 7 civil aviation flight schools which
are unable to train enough pilots to meet the growing demand. Air
travel in Russia has double digit expansion.
Russian airlines are skeptical about the project. A
representative of UTair says the majority of carriers have their
own refresher courses and their own requirements for pilot
training.
“In principle, the establishment of a school outside the
airline is a dubious enterprise,” Vedomosti quotes a
spokesman of Aeroflot.
The Skolkovo Foundation is a major science and innovation center
championed by Dmitry Medvedev and headed by one of Russia’s
richest businessmen, Viktor Vekselberg. Over the past year it has
been a subject to several criminal investigations criminal investigations
concerning its management. In 2012 the budget for the
organization was 50 billion roubles (about $1.7 billion), with 42
billion roubles ($1.4 billion) allocated from the state budget.
This article originally appeared on: RT