Abu Dhabi, 29 May : The National visits Etihad Aviation Training for a taste of the high life in a multimillion dollar flight training machine. t’s been more than a year since the onset of the global pandemic and a time when travelling freely from one country to another was common. Nowadays, travel restrictions, quarantine measures and lockdowns mean that booking a holiday based purely on where you want to go is a thing of the past. Instead, travelers must first check their eligibility to visit a country, PCR-testing policies and vaccination requirements for any destination. But there is still one place in Abu Dhabi from where you can fly to any destination in the world, no tests, paperwork or other pre-departure testing necessary. I’m referring to Etihad Aviation Training, where pilots for the UAE’s national airline are trained to fly jets of all shapes and sizes. After being grounded in Abu Dhabi for well over a year, I went along to find out what it’s like to fly a plane from Abu Dhabi to the Maldives, and to hopefully satiate some of my ever-growing wanderlust.
Million-dollar machines
Etihad Aviation Training is a sprawling building in the UAE capital that is home to 10 top-of-the-range flight simulators. From a Boeing 787 to an Airbus 380, Etihad Airways’ range of simulator machines make it one of the best-equipped aviation training facilities in the world, and other airlines often come here to train their pilots. The high-tech facility doesn’t come cheap. “It costs between $15 and $20 million” for a single simulator Captain Stefan Dudda, head of training at Etihad Aviation Training, says. And that’s before you add on upkeep costs. The machines are sourced from a company called CAE, based in Canada, and are specially manufactured for Etihad under licence from Boeing and Airbus. Every time an aircraft has an update in the real-world, the simulators need to be updated to reflect it, so it’s a never-ending cycle of maintenance and care. A bumpy landing in the Maldives
It’s soon time to prepare for a descent in the Maldives – the simulators can run on real-time, but pilots typically do not sit in the machines for the same amount of flying time that it would take to go between destinations, focusing instead on practicing take-offs, landings and other simulated incidents.
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