Farnborough Airshow | CAE prepares for recovery with new training centers

With the end of health restrictions in North America, air transport can resume its pre-pandemic growth, but with a small additional stimulus from pent-up demand during the crisis. CAE will fuel the recovery — and benefit from it, too — by increasing its pilot training capacity.

The Montreal company, for example, will launch a first training center in Las Vegas by the end of the year, illustrates Alexandre Prévost, vice-president and general manager for business aviation training at CAE. The new training facility, the company’s first on the US West Coast, will house eight full-flight simulators.

With the recovery of the aviation industry being stronger in North America than elsewhere in the world — Asia and, to a lesser extent, Europe are recovering more slowly — the second training center to come from CAE will be right on time. This one will see the light of day in Savannah, Georgia.

Thousands of pilots to train

This second training center will have four flight simulators from the Gulfstream family. In this case, the center will train not only pilots, but also aircraft maintenance technicians.

“Business aviation has not only returned to growth, but in terms of the number of flights, the level of activity has even exceeded pre-pandemic levels. This means that we will need more pilots and more training,” said Alexandre Prévost.

The Savannah center will join the eight training centers already operated by CAE: one in Montreal, one in London, one in Dubai and five others across North America.

Invest in digital innovation

CAE is also positioning itself for recovery by investing one billion over five years in digital innovation.

Concretely, this sum will be invested in research and development to better exploit, in particular, analytics and artificial intelligence in order to determine and target the improvements to be made to training programs.

“For example, we can combine flight data with data collected on our simulators in order to make the training more realistic, and to target it even more on the real problems encountered by the pilots during the flight”, explains Alexandre Prevost.

Noting that the pandemic has resulted in pent-up travel demand, he observes that the end of the restrictions therefore gives impetus in the short term to the industry in North America.

“Beyond that, however, we also return to the pre-pandemic normal,” he said. When we look at how the recovery is taking place here, it helps us to predict what should happen in Europe and Asia, when their recovery will be fully underway, and how we can sustain it. »