Ural Airlines started working on a pilots’ training center: the first stone and a symbolic gold coin were laid in the foundation of the new facility on the premises of the air carrier on November 21.

The company’s Director-General Sergey Skuratov said in the course of a solemn ceremony that the assembling of all the machinery will start as soon as February 2012, and the center will be launched in early April. The building, which will be 14.5 meters high and will have the area of 700 sq m, will be fitted with two cockpit mock-ups that fully reproduce the actual cockpit of an aircraft.

One unit is meant for training pilots to operate Airbus A320/321, the other one will be used to train the crew to operate long-haul-flight airplanes that Ural Airlines intends to start using in the future.

‘The very latest cockpit simulator was bought in the Netherlands, fresh from the assembly line. It was actually manufactured specially for Ural Airlines. The training center is crucial to the company, and its primary goal is to make the flights safer. We can now train our pilots in any way and for as long as the instructors feel necessary. Unfortunately, our training time in Europe is always very limited: a standard session on a mock-up like this usually lasts three hours,’ Skuratov explained.

The cost of the simulator came to ?7.5m. In fact, the world’s leading airlines such as Emirates, Air France, and Lufthansa operate such appliances as well.