Denver to Host Training Center for United Airlines
Luciana Mangas August 22, 2016
The new hub will concentrate training for the airline’s pilots, flight attendants and mechanics worldwide.
United Airlines’ Flight Training Center in Denver is bustling with activity. Denver Post reports that the traditional training hub beat out Houston and Chicago to win the consolidated flight training center, and now the development of that project is at full steam. Their mission is to transform the 1960s Stapleton campus into a modern facility that can handle training of all 12,500 United pilots worldwide.
When the consolidation is finally complete, United will have nearly doubled the number of flight simulators it has in Denver by the end of 2017 – including modules for the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner and Airbus A350.
“Everyone is thrilled we’re going to be in one hub,” senior project manager Graham Smith said during a tour of the center recently. The construction and renovation don’t interfere with the center’s regular training schedule. Flight simulators operate 20 hours a day — idle only from 2 to 6 a.m. for maintenance.
The first of eight flight simulators – inherited from the closing Houston training center – arrived in July. Another seven are also coming from Quebec and the airline expects that all training will have been transferred to Denver by August next year.
Each simulator needs to be disassembled before transport to the new hub, and then reassembled once it gets to Denver. The whole moving process takes three to four months per unit, said flight training managing director Michael McCasky.
Turid Nagel-Casebolt, director of business development for the city’s Office of Economic Development, says that United is the number one non-retail private employer in Denver. “Even prior to the expansion, they were a very important employment cornerstone of the redevelopment of Stapleton,” Nagel-Casebolt said. “It would have been very unfortunate if we had lost the training center.”
In order to avoid that, the city and state combined forces to provide United a $13.2 million tax-incentive package so that the airline could keep 400 jobs in Denver and add at least 200 more.
The new training hubs will also train flight attendants and mechanics, in addition to the pilots.
[Photo: ABC News]
