Pilots Blog

Look East, Young Man

The popular adage when I was a lad was, "Look West, Young Man".

Nowadays, the wise advice seems to be to look to the East, certainly if you fancy a career in aviation. This week news came in suggesting that Middle East carriers were likely to require 80,000 pilots, cabin staff and support personnel over the next decade. The staff are required to operate new aircraft already on order and any additional aircraft orders likely to come out of Farnborough next week.

In the wake of the global financial meltdown the aviation industry has taken one heck of a beating but IATA revealed last month that Middle East carriers were expected to post a profit of $100 million this year against an original forecast of a $400 million loss. The good news was down to 4.3% regional growth in GDP.

Just to the East of the Gulf, India is also seeing strong growth and is busy buying up aviation manufacturers in Australia and elsewhere. Embraer expects to generate $1 billion worth of business over the next 10 years from India and at this year's IBAE conference we were told that Indian airports will handle over 600 million passengers annually by 2027 and huge infrastructure and new aircraft acquisition was required to meet demand.

Whilst the West continues to struggle with debt, the emerging and debt free economies to the East are no longer practising taxi manoeuvres on the ground, they're airborne and will soon be flying faster and further than established markets in Europe and the US.