No state-funded pilot training for the next year

The Swedish National Agency for Higher Vocational Education will not offer any new pilot courses for the autumn of 2016 and the spring of 2017. This was made official when the new course catalogue was published a couple of days ago.

The agency got a lot of attention when it decided to fund a total of 60 slots for new commercial helicopter pilots two years ago. The ground-breaking decision changed the helicopter training climate by adding an unprecedented number of simultaneous students. Two flight schools where granted 20 and 10 students respectively a year, for two years, back then, and they have actively been training the new government funded pilots since the start. The flight schools, Svensk Pilotutbildning (SPU) and BF Scandinavian Aviation Academy (SAA), have organized the ground- and flight training in Gothenburg and Västerås.

The Swedish National Agency for Higher Vocational Education (Yrkeshögskolan) established that helicopter pilot training were consistent with the agency’s profile back in 2012, and it concluded that the civil helicopter industry had a surge for 20 new pilots a year. The reason for the agency’s 2016 decision is unclear, but it will give time to determine the factual employment rate of the new state-funded pilots.