Viljoen Hails A-G’s Vision
Fiji Airways’ managing director and chief executive officer has praised Attorney-General and the Minister Responsible for Civil Aviation Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum for his vision in setting up the airline’s aviation academy.
Andre Viljoen, who joined as chief of the national airline in late December 2015, reminisced: “From our very first meeting the honourable A-G said to me, ‘Andre, my vision is one day in Fiji, we will have our own aviation academy with full flight simulators’.
“He said to me, ‘it’s not only about saving costs and efficiency for Fiji Airways, but this will be transformational’.”
He said this would enable Fiji Airways to create and develop far more Fijian pilots at the time.
Mr Viljoen was speaking during the opening of the world class $89 million Fiji Airways Aviation Academy on the Namaka side of Nadi International Airport.
“Until December 2019 prior to COVID, we had a roughly 100 Fijian pilots in our workforce, and 85 foreign contract pilots.
“So for all these reasons I’ve mentioned, and particularly the A-G’s vision in 2016/17, for the first time in the 65 year history of this company, we decided to seriously explore and investigate building our own aviation Academy right here and this would contain full flight simulators.
“And also importantly, ..... procedural training devices for Fiji Link’s turboprop aircraft.
“With a full flight simulators and these procedural trainers, we will have the devices to not only do the recurrent training of our pilots, but also in time to do ab initio development of young pilots straight out of school until they become commanders.
Seeding money
“The A-G, assisted us by obtaining a grant from the Government of Fiji of $1 million as seeding money for us to undertake an extensive, thorough and rigorous feasibility study and to develop a compelling business case.
“We appointed Sky Works and other specialists.
“Our chairman Rajesh Punja and I went across and met the CEO of CIE, the manufacturer of the simulators.
“We also met Airbus and Boeing CEOs and between CIE, Airbus and Boeing, we obtained great pricing for the simulators, but also some cash contributions, especially from Boeing and Airbus for the data and parts.
“This Aviation Academy which cost us $89 million, started operations in December, 2019.”
Mr Viljoen noted that the simulators were manufactured by CIE but the cockpits were either a Boeing cockpit or an Airbus cockpit parts and data.