It takes only two hours - roughly the time it takes for a plane to fly from Delhi to Mumbai - for a pair of pilots to complete their training on the 737 MAX simulator at Boeing's centre in Noida, the only one of its kind in India. Going by this estimate, all the 90 Spicejet pilots who the civil aviation regulator barred from flying the 737 MAX can be retrained in 90 hours.
As domestic airlines face acute shortage of pilots, the government on Thursday decided to set up a flying and training institute in Maharashtra and modernise the existing state-run body in Rae Bareli with the help of a known Canadian pilot training firm, CEA Inc. The new institution at Gondia in Maharashtra, to be called the National Flying Training Institute, would be set up as a subsidiary of Airports Authority of India in joint venture with CAE.