United opens $145M addition to pilot training center in city
United Airlines officially opened a new 150,000-square-foot building at its Flight Training Center in Denver on Thursday, marking a milestone in its quest to hire 10,000 new pilots by 2030.
United, the largest carrier at Denver International Airport, spent more than $145 million on the addition to its 23-acre campus in northeast Denver. The airline said the expansion will allow it to conduct more than 32,000 training events annually and train up to 860 pilots daily.
The training center, which United said is the largest of its kind in the world, now has eight buildings, more than 700,000 square feet of training space and 46 state-of-theart flight simulators.
The expansion of the flight center is expected to create more than 370 new jobs. More than 1,600 of United’s roughly 10,000 Denver-based employees work there, United said.
United CEO Scott Kirby, who attended the grand opening, said the Chicagobased airline is “growing faster than any airline in the industry” and the investments in pilots and training are critical to supporting expansion of the fleet in the decades ahead.
Speaking to a crowd that included United employees and local business and government leaders at the ribbon cutting, Kirby said he tells people that the training facility “is the new center of the universe for United.”
“It’s fundamental to our ability to really implement United Next (plan), which is growing United Airlines at about twice the rate that any other airline in the world has grown in history and doing that for years in a row,” Kirby told The Denver Post before the ceremony.
United hired approximately 2,300 pilots in 2023 and has added more than 300 so far this year. Kirby said the airline didn’t share the general consensus that air travel wouldn’t fully recover from the pandemic and began planning in 2020 to “leapfrog” others in the industry by expanding the workforce and its fleet.
“The most pilots we had ever hired in a year was about 900, almost all for retirements,” Kirby said.
More than $44 million was spent on hotels in Denver for pilots visiting the training center in 2023, according to United. The total is expected to increase to $65 million this year.
Count United pilot Dennis Wilson among the fans of the training center addition. After making sure a reporter using one of the simulators didn’t crash into San Francisco Bay, Wilson, with the airline for 28 years, said,
“This is the most exciting time in my career and I’ve seen a lot of exciting times.”
United Airlines approved a new contract with pilots in 2023. Kirby said the airline will meet with flight attendants March 16 as part of federal mediation to discuss a new agreement with union members.
United’s training center, first built between 1966 and 1968 on the former Stapleton Airport complex, is maxed out on space to grow any more. United spent $33 million last year to buy 113 acres near the Denver airport for additional training space, which the airline aims to have in place by 2028.
Plans filed with the city for the undeveloped parcels have sparked questions about whether United plans to eventually move its corporate headquarters to Denver. The documents said United is exploring “programmatic needs to support corporate campus activity accommodating 5,000 employees in future phases of the project.”
Kirby laughed when the question about a possible relocation came up Thursday.
“We know we’re going to need more space for a whole lot of things and this gives us optionality,” Kirby said.
The Denver airport is United’s fastest-growing hub and, as the number of flights increases, will be its largest hub, Kirby said. The training for all its 16,000 current pilots and future hires happens in Denver.
“And it’s a community that’s easy to work with. We get political and business support” to grow jobs, Kirby said. “It’s going to be a good place for us to grow with any kind of functions that we need.”
But the land near the airport was bought with an eye to building more space for the training simulators, planned to take up about 5 acres. Kirby said there are no other specific plans for the rest of the land.
“There’s nothing that’s ‘Yes.’ There’s nothing that’s ‘No.’ It’s optionality,” Kirby said.
Kirby and Jonna Mcgrath, vice president of United’s hub in Denver, said the airline is working with airport officials as upgrades are made to the security checkpoints. Mcgrath, the first woman to hold her position in Denver, praised the state-of-the-art equipment installed in the new west security checkpoint on the terminal’s Level 6.
“Overall, I’m really happy with the look and feel of the checkpoint. Now, we have to get efficient and we have to make sure it’s staffed, which has been challenging in Denver,” Mcgrath said. “We’re working with (the Transportation Security Administration) to ensure we’re using the technology as efficiently as we can to increase through-puts.”