The megacarrier located in Dubai is making significant investments in its fleet expansion planning.
Before adding new widebody aircraft to its fleet starting in 2024, Emirates will invest $135 million in a new pilot training and simulation center.
Making future plans
Emirates, the biggest of the “big three” Middle Eastern airlines, has today announced plans to start building a brand-new cutting-edge training center at its Dubai headquarters.
Six full-flight simulator (FFS) bays, along with classrooms and other training areas, will be included in the new facility’s layout in order to better prepare present and future pilots for the advent of the airline’s Airbus A350 and Boeing 777X fleets.
The brand-new facility, measuring 63,318 sq ft (5,882 sq m), is scheduled to open in March 2024. The new structure will be constructed next to the Emirates training facilities already present in Dubai, allowing for improved connectivity and closeness to all of the carrier’s other pilot training facilities.
The release states that as part of the pilot training module, the airline’s aspiring pilots will also profit from setting up and customizing the cockpit environment using customized electronic devices and uploading the data to the full-flight simulator before beginning their training session.
This ground-breaking, novel idea aims to reduce the trainee’s preparation time within the simulator, aid in maintaining attention, and maximize the training.
expanding the training capacity
In the upcoming years, as more aircraft are added to the Emirates fleet, more pilots will be needed. Also, additional pilots require more hiring and training. Emirates will be able to increase its capacity for pilot training by 54% annually with the addition of the new building to its current training institutions in Dubai.
Emirates’ pilots will have greater freedom and facilities to refine their flying abilities utilizing 17 full-flight simulators with a capacity of more than 130,000 training hours per year thanks to the additional training capacity that the new center will bring.
By June 2024, Emirates’ newest training center will start training its first group of A350 pilots, in conjunction with the expected delivery of the airline’s first Airbus A350 aircraft. Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, Chairman and CEO of Emirates, commented on the news that the airline has committed to constructing the new training facility, saying,
“This US$135 million investment will ensure Emirates’ readiness to start its pilot training before the delivery of its new aircraft fleet, which is scheduled to begin in 2024. The structure will be outfitted with the most cutting-edge simulators currently available to offer pilots the finest training while utilizing solar power to cut down on energy use.
The new aircraft will shortly be arriving…
The first A350 is scheduled to arrive somewhere in the middle of 2024, bringing Emirates’ all-widebody fleet growth plans to the next level.
In November 2019, Emirates ordered 50 Airbus A350-900 XWBs during the Dubai Air Show. According to the list price at the time, the transaction was worth $16 billion.
The airline modified an early tentative order for 30 of the type together with an additional 40 A330neos from earlier that same year, resulting in the total number of A350s. Together with the introduction of the A350s the following year, the carrier has a backlog order for up to 150 brand-new Boeing 777X aircraft that was put in back in 2013.
The order included 115 777-9 aircraft and 35 777-8 aircraft. This order, at $76 billion, is still the largest ever placed for brand-new aircraft, closely followed by the recent sizable order from Air India.
committed to making investments in future training
Emirates offers a variety of training and development programs for its whole workforce in addition to an incredible array of training facilities for its flight deck crew. They include the Emirates Aviation University, Emirates Cabin Crew Training Centre, and countless other programs established especially for certain groups of its employees in Dubai.