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Airlines face challenges in search of pilots
Indonesia’s rapidly growing aviation industry is in need of ever more skillful and competent human resources, including qualified pilots.
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Ready for take-off? A rookie pilot poses next to a Piper Warrior airplane during training at a flight school. (ANN/The Star/Nigel Tho)
Indonesia’s rapidly growing aviation industry is in need of ever more skillful and competent human resources, including qualified pilots.
However, airlines face the same old problem of dealing with regard to the qualifications of rookie pilots from flight academies across the country. Despite the availability of many fresh flight academy graduates, airlines are having a hard time recruiting high-quality ones.
During a recent panel discussion at the Indonesia Aviation Training and Education Conference (IATEC) in Jakarta, Air Asia Indonesia operations director Wuri Septiawan, for example, shared the airline’s difficulty in recruiting high-quality ab initio pilots. Ab initio pilots are pilots who have finished their education at aviation academy but do not have flight experience outside their schools yet.
To hire the best pilots, Wuri said, Air Asia Indonesia conducted a nine-stage selection process. However, the number of ab initio pilots passing the final test is small -- around 20-30 people -- from thousands of applicants entering the selection process. The airline found that many applicants fail in the written test about fundamental aviation knowledge.
“English is no problem [for AB initio pilots], digitalization is no problem for millennials. The problem is only the written test about the basic knowledge of aviation itself, which is basic fundamental knowledge on how to become a professional pilot, but most of them cannot pass it,” said Wuri, who questioned the way flight schools go about training pilots.
On the sidelines of the IATEC event, Garuda Indonesia Training Centre Crew Resource Management (CRM) inspector Capt. Prita Widjaja highlighted a lack of “link and match”, meaning there is a gap between the industry’s expectations and standards on the one side and the competency of flight schools graduates on the other. This has apparently been the case for years.
