“…Pilot certification and training for eVTOL aircraft is moving forward around the world, and at the same time that several training initiatives have already been announced, questions remain about how the industry will fill its piloting needs in the short and long term.

During the recent 2022 GUAAS [Global Urban and Advanced Air Summit] in Farnborough, every OEM [original equipment manufacturer] present declared that they would be expecting to manufacture thousands of aircraft annually once certification has been achieved,” said Hugo MacNulty, co-founder and director of commercial at VertX Aero.

VertX was formed in late 2021 by three Irish companies — ASG, VectorCap, and Avtrain — with the goal of establishing Europe’s first independent, approved eVTOL training organization in 2022.

‘Thousands of aircraft require thousands of pilots,” MacNulty said, “and the eVTOL flight training industry needs to be ahead of the manufacturing curve to meet the demand.’

FlightSafety senior vice president of simulation systems Michael Vercio noted that across the eVTOL sector, pilot demand is anticipated to initially be low, but “will scale appropriately in the following years. Current industry thinking is that the advanced air mobility market may require as many as 60,000 pilots in the next 10 years.”