Etihad Airways has held a ceremony to mark the start of construction of a $15.3m extension to its Flight Training Centre at its Abu Dhabi HQ.
The new 5,300m2 facility will house six flight simulator training bays, classrooms for pilot and cabin crew training, pilots’ briefing and debriefing rooms, a new pilots’ lounge and offices.
A sod-cutting ceremony on the site was overseen by the airline's chief operations officer, Capt Richard Hill.
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He said: “This expanded high-tech training and infrastructure facility will be one of the best in the world when completed in November 2013.
“It will be a showpiece for how we train and maintain the skills of our more than 1,200 professional pilots and 3,200 cabin crew, in addition to offering crew training support to our strategic airline partners.
“We also see this investment in training facilities as a critical piece of infrastructure linked to Etihad Airways’ own organic growth and the arrival of new fleet types in the years ahead, such as the Airbus A380, A350 and the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.”
Etihad Airways will install flight simulators for all of these new aircraft types in the expanded facility. It currently has more than 90 aircraft on order with Airbus and Boeing, and is planning to recruit 1,000 pilots and 9,000 cabin crew by 2020.
The firm's existing Flight Training Centre opened in 2007. Since then, it has trained more than 1,600 pilots and 4,000 cabin crew.
Capt Hill added: “I would like to thank the Abu Dhabi Municipality, the Urban Planning Council, Government bodies and the Abu Dhabi Civil Defence Departments for their support with this project.”
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