3 - Ministry of Civil Aviation

institutes in the country is the poor standard of Instrument Flying. There is hardly anycapability at these institutes to provide ground classes to the students. IGRUA should take. alead in this direction and provide regular Instrument Rating courses. DGCA should develop thecourse structure for .IGRUA. This will go a long way towards improving the quality of flyingtraining in the country. The expenses for these courses should be borne by the DGCA in theinterest of the development of aviation in the country.There are no facilities available in the country to provide recurrent refresher courses topilots belonging to general aviation, state governments, corporates and non-scheduledoperators. There is considerable demand for this activity, which can be exploited by IGRUA byrunning periodic and structured refresher courses.Currently, pilots holding CPL on piston engine aircraft are recruited by the airlines asco-pilots for their jet engine aircraft, which involves a big leap in the technology of the aircraft.The transition requires considerable time and effort for the pilots. This is so, because there areno small jet aircraft available in the country for training of pilots and small private traininginstitutes find it difficult to provide jet aircraft training in view of high investments involved.IGRUA should explore ways to fill this gap in the training infrastructure.Until recently, availability of helicopter pilots in the country had been limited to thepilots who retired from the defence services as there was no training institute to providehelicopter pilot training. IGRUA used to provide helicopter training but stopped this activitysometime back. Only recently,. Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), Bangalore has startedtraining for would-be helicopter pilots. Since helicopter activity in the country is increasing fast,the country should have adequate training facilities to meet the needs of this industry. IGRUAshould consider restarting training of helicopter 'pilots. This would also attract trainees fromthe neighbouring countries, where the availability of this facility is limited. IGRUA should alsoprovide refresher training to helicopter pilots for which there is no facility in the country atpresent.2.3.3 Commercialisation of IGRUAIGRUA is currently heavily dependent on the grants (given by the Central Governmentand the national carriers). This may not be sustain le. There are a number of high qualitytraining institutes elsewhere in the world which are functioning on commercial basis. It istherefore both necessary and feasible to operate IGRUA on a commercial basis in the long run,possibly as a joint venture organisation in partnership with some reputed agency. IGRUA hasthe potential to become a premier training institute in the Asian region. The restrictionsimposed by the US, after the events of September. 11, on training of, pilots in the US havecreated considerable scope for such training outside the US. This situation could be exploitedby IGRUA. IGRUA has been providing training to foreign nationals also. The foreign traineesare required to undergo security clearance before they receive flying training. It reportedlytakes considerable time to obtain the security clearance, forcing the trainees in many cases togo to other countries such as Australia. While security is of key importance and may not becompromised, the procedures could be streamlined to reduce the. delay. Assistance in thisprocess can be taken .from India's embassies and High Commissions.