Kazakhstan's authorities are aiming to raise the proportion of locally trained pilots to 80% of the total by 2018.
This would be a stepping stone to having the nation's airlines reliant solely on such flightcrew by 2020, in the vision set out by civil aviation committee head Beken Seidakhmetov.
"Commercial pilot training requires a substantial investment of both time and money, which is why 35% of pilots employed by our carriers are foreign citizens," admits Seidakhmetov.
But he says the government has addressed the problem by allocating necessary financial resources to a flight academy in Almaty: "It has already received 1.7 billion tenge [$9.34 million] from the state treasury to purchase modern trainer airplanes. We also plan to disburse additional funds for construction of a designated flight simulator complex and a training aerodrome there."
Source: Cirium Dashboard
