The demand has resulted in growth in the number of institutes that offer aspiring pilots assistance in getting admissions to schools overseas. “We were into ground training, but the problems faced by our students in completing the flying training in India prompted us to offer this service. The appreciation of the rupee has also made overseas study a viable option,” says Vikas Yadav, a manager at the Pune branch of Indira Gandhi Institute of Aeronautics, IGIA.
IGIA, for example, has partnered with three schools—Basair Aviation College in Australia, WCC Masters Flying School in the Philippines and the US Flight Academy in Texas.
Sunsea Aviation, based in Chennai, has collaborations with Flight Academy of New Orleans in the US, Springbank Air Training College in Canada, Philippine Pilot Training Centre in the Philippines and Aerocare Flight Academy in South Africa.
Basair’s website shows that its courses for Indian students are booked until November.
According to some estimates, up to 2,000 Indian students are studying in flying schools overseas. While US and Australia have been popular choices, the Philippines has recently emerged as an equally attractive option because of the lower fees and also because Indian students do not need visas to study in that country.
While students may end up paying more than $45,000 for a course in the US, flying schools in the Philippines charge about $37,000. Almost 40% of the students that enroll with IGIA opt to go to flying schools in the Philippines.
Slowly, demand is growing to bring aviation regulations in line with the hunger for trained pilots.
“There are currently about 2,000 people who are eligible to fly, but have not yet got their commercial pilot licence in India because of the warped procedures involved,” says an industry official, who did not wish to be identified.
One of the grouses is that the conversion exams are not conducted frequently enough. Indian regulations stipulate that a licence has to be converted within six months of completion of the course. However, the directorate general of civil aviation only conducts exams once in three months. The percentage of successful candidates is also very low.
“At the last exam, only about 250 of the almost 2,000 students cleared,” says an official at one of the institutes. “This means that students who do not clear the exam in two consecutive attempts have to once again go overseas and complete a minimum number of flying hours before they can appear for the exam.”
“It is a little hard to believe that even students who train at the best training schools in the world aren’t good enough to clear the examination. These pilots get more and more frustrated with the system and eventually leave,” says the father of one pilot who wasted three years trying to get through the exam after training at a leading flight school in the US. “Given that the aviation industry in the country is facing a huge shortage of pilots, it’s ridiculous that we let them languish while we hire pilots from other countries,” he adds.