A French company plans to set up simulators in Calcutta to train pilots, a facility now lacking in this part of the country.

Simaero, headquartered in Paris, will set up its first pilot training centre in Delhi-NCR and the facility will have eight full-flight simulators. The company is planning two more satellite facilities and the first would be in Calcutta, said a Simaero official.

A flight simulator is a pilot-training device in which the cockpit and instruments on an aircraft are duplicated and the conditions of actual flight simulated.

“The Delhi facility near the airport will be operational in the first quarter of 2025. Initially, there will be two to three simulators and later the number will go up. In the next five years we are planning to develop two satellite centres and the first one will be in Calcutta,” Khushbeg Jattana, the general manager of Simaero India, told Metro.

“Calcutta will have three to four simulators.”

The second satellite unit would be in south India, probably in Bangalore, he said.

The Delhi facility will have flight simulators for Airbus A320, ATR 72-600 and Boeing 737.

Jattana, of Simaero India, said the demand for flight simulators is huge in eastern India as there are no such facilities there.

The demand is not just among pilots based in Calcutta and other places in eastern India, said Jattana. He hinted that pilots in Nepal and Bangladesh, too, can avail of such a facility in eastern India “as there are many airlines and pilots there but no simulators”.

The company is looking at spending $100 million in the next five years to train around 5,000 pilots.

Air India, too, is installing flight simulators at its aviation training academy in Gurugram. It will house 20 simulators to train pilots for the Airbus and Boeing fleets.

According to Simaero, India has approximately 12,000 pilots and the country’s growing aviation sector requires three times more pilots over the next two decades.

“There is a deficit of three to five flight simulators every year in India,” said Jattana.

In India, pilots said, rules framed by the directorate general of civil aviation state that they have to undergo skill tests every six months to renew their licence.

“The skill tests can either be done in an aircraft or flight simulator. However, training in an actual aircraft is very costly because of the involvement of aviation turbine fuel,” said a senior pilot based in Delhi.

Another pilot, based in Calcutta, said pilots from the city undergo refresher training in Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai and even abroad as there are no simulators here.

“Because of the shortage of simulators across India, slots are often not available. So, we have to go abroad to get trained,” said the pilot.

The pilots have to undergo training to handle all normal and emergency procedures, including engine failure, engine fire, hydraulic failure, pressurisation failure and electrical failure.

They are also trained in using upgraded instrument landing systems and operating flights in dense fog, rain and other adverse weather conditions, said the pilot.

“The cost of setting up a simulator is $10-12 million. So there are only a few simulators,” said an official of an airline.

The senior pilot from Delhi said that in the mid-1980s, the simulators had basic features. “So, we did half the training in simulators and the rest in aircraft. In the 1990s, the six-axis flight simulators were introduced, which gave the complete feel of an aircraft cockpit,” the pilot said.

He said there should be more simulators in India to bring down the training cost.

“Now, the cost is 20 per cent more compared to other countries. More simulators can bring down the cost,” he said.

Pilots, however, agree that simulators cannot train a pilot in handling hijacking situations like the one faced by IC 814. The Indian Airlines flight was hijacked while it was on its way from Kathmandu to Delhi in December 1999 and taken to Kandahar in Afghanistan.

“Such skills are taught in classes. However, each hijacking situation is different from another. What finally matters is the sharpness of mind and the ability to make decisions on the ground,” said the pilot.