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Spartan to open schools in India(Tulsa World (OK) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Mar. 24--Spartan College of Aeronautics and Technology, the Tulsa institution that has trained 80,000 aircraft mechanics and pilots since 1928, will open four training schools in India during the next year, school officials said Thursday. Spartan President and CEO Brent Mills said a prosperous Indian economy and a growing aerospace industry created a demand for more mechanics and pilots. "Right now, India is graduating 30 pilots a year from their domestic and government school systems," Mills said. "They need 3,000 a year. We hope to graduate 200 pilots a year from each of the four schools." Spartan is launching its $20 million-to-$30 million venture in partnership with Indus Aviation Inc., an aircraft manufacturer in Bangalore, India. Spartan will use Indus' T-211 low-wing side-by-side trainer in the four flight schools, Mills said. The four schools will be geographically dispersed to make them convenient to India's 1.08 billion people, a third of whom are under 14 years of age and 59.5 percent of whom are literate, according to the CIA's "World Factbook." The largest of the schools, and the only one with both a flight school and an airframe and powerplant training curriculum, will be in Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, on India's west coast, Mills said. A city of 12 million people, Mumbai is the commercial and entertainment capital of India. Bangalore, in the southern tip of the country, is known as the Silicon Valley of India and home to the country's computer software industry. A city of 6.1 million people, it will be the site of a Spartan flight school. "Mumbai and Bangalore are where a lot of the aircraft MRO (maintenance, repair and overhaul) work is being done," Mills said. "There is a critical mass of people and work in the aviation industry in those two cities." Spartan also will establish flight schools in Sholapur in northwest India and at Calcutta in eastern India. Sholapur, a city of 604,000 people, is a textile manufacturing center. Calcutta, with 4.5 million people, is the commercial and financial hub of east India and home to the country's second largest stock exchange, the Calcutta Stock Exchange. Mills said the four schools will employ up to 750 people, who will be trained by 130 Spartan instructors. Spartan's training venture in India is its second foray into the Asian aerospace industry. From 2001 to 2005, Spartan trained more than 500 student pilots from China at its flight school at Jones Riverside Airport. Unlike its experience training Chinese pilots, Spartan won't be translating texts and tests for its Indian students, Mills said. "English is the predominant language," Mills said. "Hindi is spoken also, but India is a former British colony. There is a core group of highly educated people who speak English. It helps in contract discussions and negotiations." A scout team of Spartan employees is in India looking at potential facilities in the four cities. Mills said he plans to meet with Prafur Patel, India's civil aviation minister, April 7 in India to outline Spartan's plans. A country slightly larger than a third the size of the United States, India has 333 airports, 239 of them paved, according to the CIA. ------------ D.R. Stewart 581-8451 [email protected] |