[mmmatt]

Location of school's new satellite campus will be announced within weeks

Times & Transcript (Moncton)
Sat 24 Feb 2007
By Brent Mazerolle Times & Transcript Staff


The Moncton Flight College is one of Metro Moncton's greatest success stories and as it approaches its 80th year in operation, it looks like it has finally outgrown its airport.

MFC and CANLink Aviation, a division of Saint John's CANLink Global, announced they were entering into a more formal partnership yesterday, following the success of their joint efforts in China to land the largest pilot training contract in Canadian history.

Now with a half-dozen other airlines around the world negotiating to train pilots at Canada's largest flight school, MFC has reached a franchise agreement with CLA that will see a satellite campus set up at another airport.

A media release put out yesterday by the Moncton Flight College said the location of the new campus will be announced in a matter of weeks.

Principal Mike Doiron wasn't prepared to disclose the location yesterday but did say it would be in New Brunswick.

"The limiting factor is air space," Doiron said of the need to look beyond Metro Moncton's horizon. "We need lots of room to maneuver out of each other's way."

It is also not cost efficient or particularly educational to have planes and their pilots stacked up on the tarmac facing long waits for take-off clearance. It was decided creating capacity at another airport was the way to go. "We also don't want to adversely affect the airport's commercial traffic business," Doiron said.Last May, MFC signed a pilot training contract with the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics worth $13 million. The contract is expected to grow to over $60 million in the next five years.

So far, three cadres of 30 Chinese flight students have come to Moncton. There will be two more this year, a group arriving in April and another in August.

It is the anticipated contracts with other airlines that is driving the development of the second campus.

Meanwhile the future of aviation looks bright indeed. Doiron said industry analysts predict a worldwide need for as many as 350,000 new pilots over the next 20 years, and that's a projection of aviation's growth, minus considerations of pilot retirements. China alone estimates needing 11,000 new pilots by 2010, and another 18,000 by 2015.

While there are flight schools in Canada with more aircraft, Doiron said as best he can figure in the face of competitive secrecy about student numbers, MFC has the largest enrollment in the nation.

It is able to handle a maximum of 240 flight students and Doiron said the Chinese contract alone has almost doubled the school's operation.

Just in the past six months, the school has hired 35 new staff, mostly flight instructors, maintenance crew and dispatchers. The school has a fleet of two dozen aircraft and plans to purchase three to six more in the next six months.