Based on CAE’s 2023 Aviation Talent Forecast, more than 8,000 pilots and 10,000 technicians will need to be recruited and trained for European business aviation operations in less than 10 years. The company expects the worldwide business aircraft fleet to grow 18% by 2032, “with up to 26,000 business jets in service and the need for more than 100,000 new business aviation professionals to be recruited.”
CAE continues to build more aircraft simulators and open training facilities around the world to help meet the growing demand for business aviation pilots and technicians. “All we do is based on where we see demand,” said CAE business aviation division president Alexandre Prévost.
Last year, CAE said it will open a dedicated business aviation training facility in Vienna, Austria, that initially will house simulators for the Bombardier Global 6000 and 7500 and Challenger 3500, as well as Embraer Phenom 300. This center is set to open in the second quarter of 2025.
“This is the first expansion in business aviation in Europe in many years,” Prévost said, and it complements additional centers opened in the past two years. This includes CAE’s Singapore facility equipped with a Gulfstream G650 simulator; the Las Vegas center, which began operations in late 2022; facilities in Savannah, Georgia; and the CAE-Simcom training complex in Lake Nona, Florida, which opened late last year.
Additionally, a Phenom 300 simulator has just come online at CAE’s Burgess Hill training center in the UK. “These are all based on growing demand for pilot training and CAE’s expanding closer to where the customer needs us to be,” he said.
Adding simulators and facilities isn’t the only way CAE is meeting demand. “We’re focusing on building training programs that are data-driven,” Prévost explained.
This not only helps CAE improve training quality but also efficiency. “Aircraft are a lot more technological and they’re more complex to fly, but at the same time a newer generation of pilots are coming in,” he said.
CAE captures data from the simulator and measures how trainee pilots are performing, and the company is now working with aircraft manufacturers to gather operational insights from their fielded aircraft fleets. Real-time data from training events helps inform debriefing sessions but also serves to highlight trends on specific aircraft platforms that can help improve the training process for the individual pilot and the operator.
“We’re still continuing to expand that network,” Prévost said. “As with everything with data, we continuously learn as we gather more of it. The data-driven program helps us deliver better-quality training.”
Another area of expansion is CAE’s remote ground school. While regulators have allowed online ground school for recurrent pilot training, its use in initial training courses had been constrained. But CAE is now able to offer FAA-certificated pilots some online computer-based training for initial courses.
“It used to be all in the training center,” Prévost said. Now pilots can complete some training days remotely and then finish ground school at the center along with the simulator portion. “This reduces the number of days they have to be in our facility.”
For maintenance technicians, CAE has expanded its use of virtual reality (VR) tools and is also testing combined VR and augmented reality. “We see a real benefit,” he said. “It makes it easier to do practical training and have people in different locations interact with each other in a VR environment.”
Students can practice tasks and build muscle memory, he explained, and there is an added benefit of reducing the risk of causing damage to a real aircraft. CAE is adding maintenance training at its Vienna training center when it opens in 2025, as well as at the Burgess Hill center.
CAE hasn’t expanded VR training to pilots yet. “We’re looking into it,” Prévost said. “We’re always looking at how to leverage new technology.”