CAE executives have rushed to Farnborough from Barcelona, Spain, where the company last week inaugurated a new center for commercial aircraft pilots and cabin crew near the main operating base of Vueling Airlines, the new facility’s anchor customer. The Canada-based group also recently expanded its training network by opening a new facility in South Korea and acquiring Oxford Aviation Academy in the UK.
The new Spanish facility, which has annual capacity to train600-pluspilotsand 1,000 cabin crew every year, features an Airbus A320 full-flight simulator (FFS), is expandable to four simulator bays, and offers training to other A320 operators. CAE is recruiting cabin crew candidates for Vueling Airlines and will offer 20-plus training courses annually, each catering for about 30 students. Barcelona is CAE’s third training location in Spain after a Madrid facility, which has been operating since 2002, and a Boeing 737NG unit at Palma, Mallorca.
Also last week, CAE announced orders from three continents for FFSs and other training devices worth about $50 million. The orders cover an Airbus A330 FFS for Russia’s Aeroflot, a Boeing 787 unit to Air Canada and a 737NG unit to the Kunming Aviation Safety Training Centre in China. CAE has also booked sales for two integrated procedures trainers (IPTs) and two virtual maintenance trainers (VMTs) with Air Canada, and various flight-training devices and simulator updates to other undisclosed customers.
Jeff Roberts, president of CAE’s civil simulation products, training and services group, told AIN that the latter equipment includes Airbus pilot-transition trainers (APTs) and Airbus competence-training classrooms, simulator visual updates and replacements, a simulator relocation for an OEM partner, simulator avionics suite and instructor-operator station software updates and maintenance/flight-training devices (M/FTDs).
Aeroflot’s CAE 7000-series FFS will be delivered to Moscow Sheremetyevo Airport next year, with the carrier also using CAE capacity in Brussels, Madrid and Rome. A similar 787 device, IPTs and VMTs will arrive in Toronto for Air Canada in 2013. Also next year, China’s Kunming Aviation Safety Training Center will receive its 7000-series 737NG FFS with a “third-generation” CAE Tropos 6000 visual system.
Later this year, CAE will open a new training center near Seoul’s Gimpo International Airport in South Korea to train 737-800 pilots. The facility will initially offer a 737-800 FFS and IPT, with additional training capacity to be added as necessary for operators in Korea and Japan. An earlier Korean unit offers third-party training on an A330 FFS in the Asiana Airlines training center.
In June, CAE agreed business worth more than $65 million covering four FFSs, training devices and updates including an FFS for an unspecified medium-sized transport aircraft being developed by China’s Avic, an A330 FFS to Singapore Airlines, an A320 FFS to China Southern Airlines/CAE joint venture Zhuhai Flight Training Center and an Embraer ERJ190/195 to an undisclosed European customer. CAE also sold simulator updates and training devices to various customers, including Simfinity IPTs, APTs, FTDs and Simfinity Virtual Simulators (VSIMs).
