Air India Orders 34 Trainer Aircraft for Its Amravati Flying School

Air India has ordered 34 trainer aircraft for the Flying Training Organisation (FTO) it is building at Belora airport in Amravati, Maharashtra. The order, announced in late December 2024, covers 31 single-engine aircraft from Piper Aircraft of the United States and three twin-engine aircraft from Austria's Diamond Aircraft, with deliveries due to start in 2025.

The airline said the Amravati school would be the largest FTO in South Asia, with a target of graduating 180 commercial pilots a year. Cadet training was planned to begin in the second half of 2025, subject to regulatory approval from India's Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA).

The aircraft

All 34 aircraft have glass cockpits based on the Garmin G1000 avionics suite and engines that run on Jet A-1 rather than aviation gasoline. The single-engine type is the Piper Archer DX, a diesel-powered version of the long-running PA-28 Archer. The twins are Diamond DA42 NGs, a common multi-engine trainer at airline academies.

The fuel choice matters in India. Jet A-1 is available at every commercial airport, whereas avgas supply is far more limited, and diesel piston engines generally burn less fuel per hour than the petrol engines they replace. A G1000 cockpit also gives cadets early exposure to the screen-based instrument layout and automation they will meet on airliners.

Sunil Bhaskaran, director of the Air India Aviation Academy, said the order was part of a large expansion of the airline's training capacity and would help reduce India's reliance on training abroad.

Why Air India is building its own pipeline

Air India has been under Tata Group ownership since January 2022 and is in the middle of a five-year transformation programme called Vihaan.AI. Its fleet plans are large: in February 2023 it ordered 470 aircraft from Airbus and Boeing, and in December 2024 it added 100 more Airbus aircraft, made up of 10 A350s and 90 A320 family jets. Every one of those aircraft needs several crews, and Air India Express, the group's low-cost arm, is growing at the same time.

For years, a large share of Indian cadets have gone overseas for their commercial pilot licence training, to countries such as the United States, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, because domestic FTOs could not supply enough graduates. That costs families more and sends training money out of the country. The DGCA and the civil aviation ministry have encouraged airlines and private operators to open more domestic schools, and Air India's FTO is one of the largest responses so far.

Running its own school also lets the airline shape training to its operating standards from the first lesson, rather than retraining graduates from many different schools.

The Gurugram academy

The Amravati FTO is intended to feed the Air India Aviation Training Academy in Gurugram, near Delhi, which the airline describes as the largest facility of its kind in South Asia at around 600,000 square feet. Cadets who complete their licence at Amravati are expected to move on to Gurugram for airline-specific and type-rating training.

What has happened since

• January 2025: Piper confirmed the single-engine order as 31 firm Archer DX aircraft for delivery in 2025, plus options on 62 more for 2026 and 2027. Air India also joined Piper's Flight School Alliance.
• October 2025: Air India and Airbus opened a joint pilot training centre of about 12,000 square metres at the Gurugram academy. It is planned to house 10 full flight simulators, eight for the A320 family and two for the A350, and the partners said it would train more than 5,000 pilots over a decade.
• December 2025: The first two DA42 NGs were ferried from Diamond's factory at Wiener Neustadt, leaving on 7 December and arriving in Ahmedabad on 10 December after a journey of about 6,700 km across six countries. By then, 13 Piper aircraft had been shipped to India.
• August 2026: The school, now branded Air India Flying Academy, received DGCA approval as a combined airworthiness organisation, effective 5 August 2026, covering maintenance of its PA-28-181 and DA42 fleet. Air India lists the full fleet of 31 Archers and three DA42 NGs, plus two single-engine Frasca simulators and one Diamond multi-engine simulator, on a campus of about 10 acres that can house up to 180 cadets at a time.

The published syllabus provides 200 flight hours, 185 on single-engine and 15 on multi-engine aircraft, within a commercial pilot licence course of about 18 months. The original target of starting training in the second half of 2025 slipped: as of August 2026, no start date for the first cadet intake's flying had been published.