The boom in air travel throughout the Middle East and beyond has certainly reaped economic rewards, but not without a significant amount of growing pain, particularly in countries where the existing infrastructure can barely support today’s level of traffic. Thankfully for Dubai and many other Gulf states, a wealth of investment resources helps conquer virtually any building challenge the rulers choose to confront. But while a seemingly limitless supply of itinerant labor from developing countries can pour runway concrete and lay electrical lines, it takes years of education and training to develop an airline or business jet pilot–a human commodity still in short supply throughout the Middle East and, increasingly, the world.
According to Alteon, Boeing’s wholly owned flight training subsidiary (Stand C510/610), the airline industry alone will need 17,000 new pilots each year until 2024. Faced with such a global drain on flight crew resources, carriers from this region quickly recognized the need to not only foster local flight crew talent, but to build enough training capacity of their own to accommodate the vast number of expatriate pilots needed to maintain their explosive growth.
