By Libya Herald staff.
Tripoli, 3 April 2014:
Payment delays are preventing some 500 trainee pilots from taking up courses in . . .[restrict]the UK and Ireland, one of the prospective airmen has told the Libya Herald.
“We have been waiting to start these courses since 2012 and the Transport Minister himself promised, live on TV that we would all have gone by the end of 2013,” said one of the 520 pilots waiting to leave for England. “But we are still here waiting, in April 2014.”
The prospective pilot, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that one batch of some 60 pilots had been sent to Ireland in January and that just ten more had been sent in March to the UK. “These ten guys were the ones who volunteered to work on our paperwork, so I think maybe they were sent first as some kind of reward,” he said. “There are over 500 still waiting here in Libya, not in the UK.”
It had taken more than two months to get the student visas sorted, the trainee said, but then the prospective pilots were told they would not be able to leave for the UK until the Central Bank of Libya (CBL) had transferred money into UK accounts.
Frustrated at these further delays, some students approached the Ministry of Transport, which is behind the project to train 520 new pilots and 108 air traffic controllers. “They literally said it wasn’t their problem or their fault and told us to go and speak to CBL,” he said.
A group of students then went to CBL and started asking questions about why payment was taking so long. “They said the manager was on vacation so he’s not here, which was ridiculous because then he arrived,” the student said. “He looked at the paperwork and said the number was too high and sent it back to the accountants and said they needed to review it.”
The student described these latest delays as “ridiculous” and said the prospective pilots were planning to demonstrate outside CBL, if the paperwork was not signed by Thursday.
The director of Prime Education, the UK-based company responsible for dealing with administration and visas for the project, Tevfik Sekerci, said that it was unaware of this problem until some students came to its Libya office today.
“When I spoke with the Ministry of Transport they told me it is a matter of days before they resolve the payment issue,” he said. The problem as he understood it, Sekerci said, was to do with payment for UK accommodation for the students which the CBL had not yet processed.
The former CEO of one of Libya’s airline has estimated that the country needs around 75 new pilots per year, through a combination of retiring senior airmen and the anticipated fleet expansion of the state-owned airlines. He added, however, that there were currently between 80 and 100 newly-trained pilots in the country who were effectively unemployable because they had gained their qualifications at “low-standard schools” and “did not meet international standards.”
It was not possible to contact anyone at the Ministry of Transport or CBL this evening. [/restrict]
