India — Air India has announced that Pawan Dhariwal will assume the role of Head of Operations of its new of Air India Flying Training Academy, coinciding with an ambitious expansion of its domestic pilot training infrastructure. The Air India Flying Training Academy, being constructed at Amravati Airfield in Maharashtra, will operate around 34 aircraft and 3 fixed training devices.

• Air India is the first airline in India to announce the setting up of an FTO that will complement Air India’s commitment to power India’s aviation ecosystem in the coming years.
• The fleet will consist of 31 single-engine aircraft from Piper Aircraft and 3 twin-engine aircraft from Diamond Aircraft in Austria
• The FTO is a leap forward in Air India’s commitment to bolster its training infrastructure as part of its Vihaan.AI transformation program and cultivate a pipeline of pilots as it expands its fleet, becoming self-reliant.
• The FTO will target to graduate 180 commercial pilots every year as it scales.
• At the FTO in Amravati, Air India is developing a state-of-the-art training institute over 10 acres, with digitally enabled classrooms at par with global academies, hostels, a digitized operations center, and its own maintenance facility to elevate operational efficiency.

Source: Pawan Dhariwal
Photo Credit: Air India (shown as meta image)