Pilots from Rae Bareli top AI hiring list
New Delhi: Campus selection of trainee pilots is few and far between in the country with nearly 4,000 of them looking for jobs in a surplus market.
Aspiring pilots, however, can hope to improve their prospects if they are from the flying training school in Rae Bareli, the parliamentary constituency of Congress president Sonia Gandhi.
Almost 62 candidates out of the total 80 pursuing the training course at the Rae Bareli academy have been recruited and one can easily guess the recruiting airline. Public sector airline Air India has hired the trainee pilots even as it is facing the problem of plenty. This has happened at a time when Uttar Pradesh is going to polls next year and politicians want to charm people with the feel-good factor.
“Air India offered the letters of appointment to 62 pilots in July. The airline had come for a lesser number of pilots but it found quality in our pilots and hired more,” Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Uran Akademi (IGRUA) director Air Marshal V K Verma (retd) told FE over phone.
A source in Air India said the airline could have been under political pressure to hire pilots from IGRUA. Air India did not respond to a detailed questionnaire sent by FE.
Sarah Aviation director Akhileshwar Prasad said that private airlines were hiring entry-level pilots from across the country following several levels of screening. “The best employers in the country are private airlines and they hire from across the country and not just from IGRUA,” Prasad said.
According to an industry estimate, airlines operating short-haul jets like A320s and B737s keep 10 pilots for each aircraft. Air India has a fleet of 135 aircraft out of which nearly 30 are not in operation. It maintains a pilot strength of 1,700.
When asked if private airlines were also hiring good number of trainee pilots from IGRUA, its director VK Verma said the academy did not keep this record. IGRUA has the capacity to train 100 junior pilots annually.