 "Aviation minister Naidu urges Airbus to make commercial aircraft in India")
Aviation Minister K Rammohan Naidu on Thursday urged European aircraft maker Airbus to start manufacturing commercial planes and train helicopter pilots in India.
“We want to manufacture aircraft in India that can serve the civil travel needs of India. That has been a dream under the visionary leadership of our honourable Prime Minister. We feel that Airbus has a very big role to play,” he said after inaugurating Airbus headquarters in Delhi.
“They (Airbus) are already doing their bit. They are expanding their footprint when it comes to manufacturing the components of aircraft… We want to design, manufacture, and maintain the aircraft in India. That is a very big change in mindset,” he noted.
IndiGo had in June last year placed the world’s largest aircraft order for 500 A320 narrow-body family planes with Airbus. The airline in July this year also placed an order for 30 A350 wide-body planes. Air India in February last year also placed an order for 250 Airbus planes.
While Airbus has formed entities to manufacture the C295 military transport plane and the H125 civil helicopter in India, it does not plan to set up any facility in the country to manufacture civilian aircraft.
Naidu said: “Another fact I want to see is the growth of civil helicopter operations in the country. We want to train pilots for these helicopters. A thought has to be put into training more such pilots. This bottleneck has to be dealt with. There is only one institute in India. Airbus has a role to play in that.”
Naidu mentioned that Indian carriers currently have 800 planes in their fleet. “About 1,500 planes are going to come. In the next 20 years, we might need 4,000 planes for the Indian aviation sector,” he noted.
Airbus headquarters, inaugurated in Delhi on Wednesday, is for India and South Asia. It has four A320 aircraft simulators. Naidu praised its capacity to train 800 pilots and 200 technicians per year.