Thousands of Russian pilots will be trained at the Boeing training and research centre that opened at the Skolkovo innovation city last summer, the head of the U.S. aviation giant in Russia said in an interview with Vedomosti newspaper published Wednesday.
Sergei Kravchenko, president of Boeing in Russia and the CIS. Photo: Sk.ru.
“Four flight simulators will operate there, each one of which is worth up to $15 million, and thousands of Russian pilots will be trained on them,” Sergei Kravchenko, president of Boeing in Russia and the CIS, told the business daily.
“At the moment, two simulators made by Boeing [the Boeing Next-Generation 737 and Boeing 777 full flight simulators] are in place and Russian airline pilots are being trained on them. Next year, the first certified simulator made in Russia will appear,” said Kravchenko.
The state-of-the-art Boeing centre was opened on June 3 during Skolkovo’s annual Startup Village large-scale event. It is the first one out of more than 10 training centres where research activity will be carried out as the same time as training commercial pilots, Boeing Flight Services vice president Sherry Carbary, who is responsible for the centres, said at the opening.
The centre is designed to train pilots, technical and engineering personnel, while its research department works on devising new training technologies and innovative simulators.
Kravchenko said ahead of the opening that the new centre would use big data obtained from flight simulators to analyse all possible situations in the cockpit and allow the company to reduce even further the risk of human error during flights.