Ethiopia to build airport hub, graduates 201 professionals

ETHIOPIAN government has concluded plans to build a new airport for the capital, Addis Ababa next year. The facility, expected to take eight years and cost $4 billion, will serve as a major hub for African air transport, according to the Transport Minister, Workneh Gebeyehu.

He said the airport would have four runways and capacity for more than 100 million passengers per year.
He stated that the Ethiopian government has narrowed the choice of prospective sites to three, all of which are between 37 and 44 miles from the center of Addis Ababa. While French airport engineering specialist ADPI is conducting the planning study for the new facility.

Meanwhile, Ethiopian Airports Enterprise is completing a $350 million expansion of Addis Ababa’s existing Bole International Airport. This project is scheduled for completion in 2018 and will triple the current passenger capacity of 7 million per year, he noted.

Also, Ethiopian Aviation Academy, the largest aviation academy in Africa has announced that it has graduated 24 pilots, 96 aviation maintenance technicians, 37 cabin crew and 44 marketing professionals held at Ethiopian Headquarters on Monday.
The training has equipped the graduates with sufficient theoretical and practical knowledge to qualify them in their carrier as Aviation professionals.

The Group Chief Executive Officer, Tewolde GebreMariam, who congratulated the new graduates and welcomed them to the airline’s fast growing and dedicated workforce, gave out diplomas to all the graduates, flight wings to graduating pilots and cabin crew and achievement award to graduates with outstanding academic performance.
His words: “Ethiopian Aviation Academy is the bedrock of the airline’s success. Self-sufficiency in training of all aviation Services expertise right from the inception of our business has been one of the major success factors of Ethiopian Airlines.

That is why we have invested huge amount of time, energy and money for the expansion of our Aviation Academy to meet the demand for trained aviation expertise of the 21st century and to set the standard in high-level quality education demanded by the aviation profession.

He added, “We will continue to invest in the Academy to scale up its capacity both in scope and scale not only to meet our internal demand for more than 17,000 employees envisaged in our vision 2025 but also to address the critical shortage of trained and qualified aviation professionals prevailing in the continent of Africa. Shortage of trained and skilled human power is one of the major reasons why our continent is lagging behind in all measurements of development in the civil aviation sector.”

Ethiopian Aviation Academy is certified by the Ethiopian Civil Aviation Authority, the U.S Federal Aviation Administration, the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), and IATA Safety Audit (IOSA). The Academy has been providing training for pilots, maintenance technicians, cabin crew, marketing personnel and in leadership development for Ethiopian and 50 different countries from all over the world for more than six decades.