“I’m encouraged by the signs of improvement we continue to see with increasing business jet utilization,” Marc Parent stated in a Q&A with investment analysts in May. The CAE President and CEO suggested looking beyond improving statistics, which show year-over-year global increases of more than 6 percent. “Utilization of business aircraft itself doesn’t give you the whole story. I think you’ve got to look at other metrics that tell us that there’s still a lot of growth potential to bring us back to anywhere near where we were prior to 2008. For example, prior to 2008, business jets were operating north of 500 hours a year, and now they’re operating about 300 to 350 hours a year. So if you get to any kind of higher utilization for aircraft, that will have a pretty significant impact, because obviously, you need more pilots.”
Asked if a return to historic levels will require either improved use of simulators already in the CAE network or more simulators, Parent said, “I think both. Some older models may not be as full, but they’re quite profitable because they are down the depreciation curve. But there is definitely opportunity to add more business jet sims. For sure. We will continue to add some to cater to the increased demand that we see out there in business aircraft. We’ll fill the ones we’ve got and probably add some, just because there are more airplanes out there; and new models and will require more sims.”
Don’t look for CAE to add new simulators to its business jet training centers in Latin America, though. The region is lagging the rest of the world with only a 0.4 percent year-over-year increase in Central America (according to JSSI statistics) and 6.4 percent in South America—but on a historic base of the lowest average flight hours globally.
CAE operates Embraer Phenom 100 and 300 initial and recurrent pilot training programs in São Paulo at its CAE Guarulhos airport facility. Most Latin American business aircraft customers continue to commute to CAE’s training centers in Dallas, Texas or Morristown, New Jersey in the U.S., or London and Amsterdam in Europe. The Montréal, Canada-headquartered training provider also features business jet simulators in Dubai and Shanghai.
One of CAE’s flagship customers is Flexjet/Flight Options, which last year renewed its training contract for another six years across multiple aircraft platforms, including Embraer, Bombardier, Cessna, Gulfstream, and Nextant.
The CAE Master Pilot Training Program is now offered in all its business aviation training centers. Endorsed by Wyvern, an aviation risk management and safety auditing company, the Master Pilot program promises to raise pilot knowledge, safety awareness, and situational response capabilities. Nick Leontidis, CAE's group president, Civil Aviation Training Solutions, said, "We train 120,000 [airline, business aviation, and helicopter] pilots and crew members every year. We know what distinguishes good pilots and great pilots. This program, with its tailored training curriculum using cutting-edge flight simulation, will allow pilots to elevate their status and training to the highest levels for in-flight safety.”
In April, CAE launched the 600XR Series flight training device (FTD) at the World Aviation Training Summit (WATS). The 600XR FTD provides a “representative” flight deck with “a fully tactile cockpit with exact panel positioning,” plus an optional Tropos collimated visual system. It leverages the simulation fidelity of the CAE 7000XR Series full-flight simulator and meets or exceeds ICAO Type 4, FAA Part 60 Level 6 FTD, and EASA II FTD qualification requirements.
There’s nascent hope that the helicopter training market might pick up in the future as the price of oil continues to rise. Some civil helicopter operators are reporting a modest increase in flight hours. Bristow, for example, announced an increase in annual flight hours for the first time in three years. Most analysts caution there is still significant overcapacity in the market since the oil-and-gas sector tailspin in 2014. In Honeywell’s most recent civil helicopter forecast, 35 percent of Latin American operators plan to acquire a new helicopter in the next five years, though half of those will be light, single-engine models for which flight simulators are typically not available.
In São Paulo, the joint venture between CAE and Líder Aviação announced an agreement last year with Leonardo Helicopters to designate CAE-Líder as the Recognized Flight Simulation Center (RFSC) for the delivery of OEM-quality AW139 courseware and flight simulator hours supporting training in South America. A CAE 3000 Series AW139 FFS has been offering training since 2016, qualified to Level D by the Agência Nacional de Aviação Civil (ANAC) of Brazil.
CAE also operates a Bell 412 FFS at its training center in Toluca, Mexico.
In the commercial airline space, Avianca and CAE begin pilot training operations this summer in Colombia in an equally owned joint venture, a 15-year agreement. Also this summer, Aeromexico Formacion, the aviation training center of Grupo Aeromexico, in partnership with CAE, is launching a new 18-month cadet pilot creation program; cadets will begin ground-school training at Aeromexico’s training center in Mexico City, followed by flight training at CAE in Phoenix, Arizona, before returning to Mexico to complete Embraer E170 type-rating training. CAE told AIN that 25 to 30 percent of the demand for new pilots is coming from Latin America.