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n a bid to improve aviation safety in the country, the Transportation Ministry has recently issued a new regulation requiring domestic carriers to only hire foreign pilots with a minimum 250 hours of flying time.

Should a local airline wish to hire a pilot to fly an Airbus plane, he or she must have 250 flight hours on that type of plane.

Bambang S. Ervan, the ministry spokesman, said the new regulation was aimed at preventing serious incidents involving foreign pilots.

“This is in anticipation of any aviation incident in the country, especially those involving foreign pilots. The regulation has been effective since Jan. 10,” Bambang said in Jakarta on Monday.

He said the new regulation was applicable to passenger airlines that bore Air Operator Certificates (AOC) 121 and 135 — scheduled and non-scheduled/chartered flights. “The regulation does not apply to pilots who fly airplanes with a capacity of less than 30 passengers,” he said.

Previously, the Indonesian government had not stipulated a specific amount of flight time for foreign pilots authorized to fly with domestic carriers, only that foreign pilots could work for Indonesian airlines for up to two years.

Most of the pilots, Bambang said, had only around 50-150 hours of flight time before they signed up with Indonesian carriers. “We believe that experienced [foreign] pilots with more flight hours can bring added benefits to our aviation industry before the slots are re-occupied by locals,” he said.

Currently, Bambang said there were some 600 non-national pilots flying with the country’s major operators: Lion Air, Garuda Indonesia, Sriwijaya Air, Citilink and Wings Air. The remaining 5,000 pilots are local.

The Indonesian aviation industry is suffering a shortage of local pilots in the face of a rapid fleet expansion by airlines in recent years.

The ministry has allowed airlines to temporarily hire foreign pilots or halt their fleet expansions pending the availability of more local pilots.

According to the ministry, Indonesia needs up to 600 new pilots annually, more than three times the total number of pilots who graduate from the state-run Curug Aviation School in Tangerang, Banten, the Aviation Academy in Surabaya, East Java and 12 other smaller private aviation schools, some of which are affiliated with local carriers.

“We are going to open two more aviation schools this year, in Medan [North Sumatra] and Makassar [South Sulawesi] to increase our capacity to produce local pilots,” Bambang added.

Contacted separately, Edward Sirait, the general affairs director of the country’s largest low-cost carrier, Lion Air, said that the new regulation had forced the airline to accelerate its capacity to produce more local pilots. “We plan to establish an aviation training academy in Kalimantan this year in order to keep up with our expanding fleet and the regulation,” Edward said.

Garuda Indonesia vice president of communications Pujobroto said that the regulation did not affect the airline’s plans as it had already limited the use of foreign pilots.

“At the co-pilot level, foreign nationals must have logged a minimum of 500 hours flight time for one type of aircraft before joining Garuda. For a pilot, the figure is 1,000 hours,” Pujobroto said.

He also said that the co-pilots and pilots underwent training twice a year by Garuda in order to improve their skills.