EasyJet is to double the number of its female pilots after opening a £2.7 million flight school.
The academy, which was launched yesterday at Gatwick, will train pilots and cabin crew from across Europe to coincide with a sharp rise in the number of routes served by the airline.
It will recruit 310 pilots over the next year along and 830 cabin crew. Training will be split between its flight schools in Luton and Gatwick.
Only 130 of easyJet’s 2,500 pilots are female, and only 6 per cent of the annual intake are women. The airline wants to double this to 12 per cent over two years.
To achieve this it intends to highlight pilot careers to pupils at schools and colleges, recruit women captains as mentors and offer ten training loans each year, worth up to £100,000 to female recruits.
Advertisement
British Airways launched a similar campaign this year.
It is feared that school-leavers are put off because of stereotypical attitudes towards women in the aviation industry.
Patrick McLoughlin, the transport secretary, said it was “astonishing to think that in 2015” men made up 94 per cent of pilots in Britain and 97 per cent across the world.
Speaking at the opening of the academy, he added: “With more initiatives like easyJet’s to attract more women to apply for pilots’ jobs, I hope we can start to tackle the imbalance and ultimately change the industry.”
The aviation school, in Concorde House, at Gatwick, will create 40 training jobs at the airport. It includes classrooms, a cabin simulator, an evacuation slide and a fire training rig.
Advertisement
The cost of training a pilot is about £100,000. Depending on previous flying experience, training can take two years. Airline captains typically earn a six-figure salary.
The rise in the number of pilots and crew coincides with a sharp increase in the budget airline’s network, with 136,000 extra flights scheduled in spring 2016 compared with this year. It flies more than 750 routes across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.
Brian Tyrrell, head of flight operations at easyJet, said: “We value diversity and we believe that having a workforce that better reflects our customers will help support our future success . . . We recognise that the proportion of our pilots who are female is too low, as it is across the industry as a whole.”