IFTC Istanbul soars with Mechtronix in the new market
In the world of aviation and of commerce today, the talk is constantly of China and India. But thereare alternative growth markets in the aviation sector and one area with growing aerospace companies is Turkey. Domestic aviation is expanding quickly to cope with the needs of both tourism and businesses developing within Turkey. The nation’s carriers have not been slow the realize they are ideally placed to offer services to their neighbours which include the Russian Federation of Turkney’s eastern border and the Gulf States further to the South east. Gozen Air Services is a case in point of a carrier seeking those new market oportunities. Based in Istanbul near the international airport, within sight of the headquarters of the national carrier Turkish Airlines,Gozen has been a supplier of sevices to the industry for over 30 years. A kind of Aviation Holding or one-stop shop wich has offered handling, luggage and catering services at all the major airports in Turkey as well as "representation. " In the mid-1990s Gozen began to offer security to cope with more modern threats. Then, in 2000, the company finally decided to become a carrier. In 2001, Freebird Airlines became the first private airline in Turkey to gain ISO 9001 approval and IATA’s International Operation Safety Audit registration, which has to include training. Eighteen months further on, Freebird had also set up its own Type Rating Training Organisation.
IFTC Istanbul adds first ever Mechtronix A320 full flight simulator
In February 2008 Gozen added another and highly significant leaf to their aviation business book and opened the International Flight Training Center or IFTC Istanbul, near Istanbul’s International airport. The technology anchoring the flight training center has come in the form of a Boeing 737Full Flight(which began operations in May) and more recently IFTC Istanbul received approval for the first ever Mechtronix Airbus A320 full flight simulator. This makes IFTC Istanbul the first all Mechtronix-equipped training organization with four Mechtronix Full Flight Simulators.
IFTC Istanbul’s reasons for choosing Mechtronix as its technology provider for this large investment were important. Former Turkish Air Force fighter pilot Cengiz Arbacis IFTC Istanbul’s General Manager. He says that the company’s culture had a lot to do with the choice of Mechtronix and having its own Type Rating Training Organization meant that the group’s airline could "set standarts rather than conform to them. " "Affordable funding for a unique project like this was essential," said Dutchman Marty van Veluw, a former long-service SITA executive in Europe is the IFTC Istanbul CEO with responsibility for finance and marketing.
Arbac recognized that his airline and other Turkish airlines were spending too much on training and traveling to hubs in Europe. "There is a really dense are of training centers servicing central and western Europe where there is a lot of training capacity but none in their region that was serving its needs adequately. " There is one center in Dubai, Gulf States, he believes, offering huge potential,"...but apart from Turkish Airlines which was - and still is- using its own training center to full capacity, for any airline based in Turkey the nearest training center is between two and three hours’ flight time. "Between recurrent training and new pilot upgrades, the airline was losing a whole crew for about four days, added to that, there is the expense of travel and accommoodation and so on...this two times a year. "Crew migration is a big problem too because you have conversions, all of it under Joint Aviation Regulations," said Arbac.
But what of the decision to go with Mechtronix? Arbac readily admits that there were a lot of options out there, and a lot of companies who provide a good package,but the route to Mechtronix was based on the fact that Mechtronix was an innovative design leader that built more affordable sims using true replication. Mechtronix used software and microprocessors to build its flight simulators without prohibitively using expensive airline parts and avionics systems to build and maintain their flight simulators. "It doesn’t take the traditional avionics team to run a Mechtronix sim," said Arbac. "You just need an affordable IT man to run it" He says that it was only when they started looking more carefully that they discovered that the real aircraft part culture was the industry norm. "The other companies insisted it had to be real aircraft parts" continues Arbac, "and it’s something that a lot of people wouldn’t question but it still seemed a strange thing to us. It must be easier to communicate electronically with your instruments rather than someone else’s which were designed for a different function. "The pair then discovered that there were few alternatives and at the time, Mechtronix was almost the only choice. We went to Montreal and saw four ourselves, and we decided that yes, these guys could do it. "After that, says Arbac, they didn’t really look any further. We also liked the electric motion that Mechtronix offered. It promised to be easier to service and maintain and it’s cleaner and more environmentally friendly than oil and hydraulics. We also liked the RSI visuals and the LCD Displays. It’s illusion of simulation,"says Arbac firmly,which is important,and I believe Mechtronix really does fulfill that need. What is most important is to provide good quality training and as long as I can do that,it’s my decision how we do it and what we choose. As long as they make me feel as if I’m in the airplane, I’m happy... But you know what," he adds,"since we made our decision, the others have been back to us offering similar concepts... These were the guys who insisted it had to be real aircraft parts, so it kind off makes us think we made the right decision in the first place. That decision came from our own aviation culture and we’d like to take the credit for that. "