ROSE HALL, St James – REGIONAL Director of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) Loretta Martin has called for worldwide cooperation in a bid to ensure a global sustainable air transport system.

Addressing the ICAO Next Generation of Aviation Professionals (NGAP) and Trainair Plus Regional Symposium at the Hilton Rose Hall Hotel yesterday, Martin emphasised that “aviation today is at an important crossroads,” and is facing “critical challenges”.

She pointed out that more attention will have to be placed in the human resource sector, over the next decade, in light of the projected global shortage in skilled aviation personnel.

She told the more than 200 delegates in attendance at the symposium that the global air transport network has doubled in size every 15 years, since 1997, adding that between now and 2030, it would double again.

“This means that the 2.9 billion airline passengers carried in 2012 will grow to over six billion by 2030, and that the 30 million flights they flew on will reach 60 million annually over the same period,” she explained.

She noted that as the sector expands, in coming years several key challenges are going to emerge that aviation must locally, regionally and globally address over the next few decades.

“One of the most important impacts on human resource development and management in our new millennium is the expansion of high technology into every major industrial sector. This, in turn, has led to tremendous competition across all industries for qualified technical personnel. In addition to this, there is also the demographic challenge of attrition,” she argued.

“One example, I would like to highlight is that between 2005 and 2015, 73 per cent of the US Air Traffic Controller population would have reached retirement age. ICAO too is facing similar challenges, with some 25 per cent of our workforce poised to reach retirement age by 2016.”

She argued that replacing one generation of experienced technical professionals with another is not as simple as upgrading infrastructure or buying new aircraft.

“ICAO’s forecasts currently project [that] in 2030 aviation workforce requirements [will be] in the area of 980,000 pilots and 1.16 million maintenance personnel worldwide. With respect to training, our major concern is not these total populations, but rather how many new employees we need to recruit and cost-effectively train to fill the emerging positions,” she pointed out.

She noted that Boeing’s 2011-2030 forecasts, for example, indicate the need for 460,000 new pilots and 650,000 new maintenance and other technicians by 2030.

“These numbers are consistent with the 2009 IATA (International Air Transport Association) study which first brought the matter to light,” she noted.

The ICAO regional director told the delegates that based on the current projections her organisation has embarked on a raft of initiatives to address the worrying situation.

“It is in light of projections such as these that training, assistance and capacity building are becoming key areas of priority for ICAO today. This is why we have to provide and expand training courses and global seminars across a wide range of domains, which includes safety, security, air navigation efficiency, and climate change,” she said.

The initiatives, she added, include:

* The Next Generation of Aviation Professionals programme, which promotes solutions specific to the projected global shortages in skilled aviation personnel, focusing primarily on recruiting and retaining strategies and new methods of training provision;

* the formalisation competency frameworks for the primary Annex 1 Personnel Licensing functions, including airline transport, pilots, air traffic controllers, and maintenance workers, and

* the signing of a new agreement with ACI (Airports Council International) and IATA, which supports a new Young Aviation Professionals Programme.

“In a more generalised sense, ICAO is also adopting its training resources and guidance to reflect latest developments. This includes the development of interactive, self-guided learning tools, as well as supporting new solutions such as the simulator-intensive and air-specific multi-crew pilot licence approach to flight crew training,” she explained.