The first com­mer­cial pi­lot train­ing school in T&T opened last week. Na­tion­als would not have to dish out hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars to pay for sim­i­lar train­ing in the Unit­ed States and the Unit­ed King­dom any more. The school is op­er­at­ed by Briko Air Ser­vices Lim­it­ed, an en­ti­ty that op­er­ates from the Cam­den Airstrip, Cou­va. De­liv­er­ing the fea­ture ad­dress at the open­ing, Sen­a­tor Fazal Karim, Min­is­ter of Sci­ence, Tech­nol­o­gy and Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion said stu­dents may be el­i­gi­ble for the Gate pro­gramme.

Karim urged of­fi­cials at Briko to sub­mit their doc­u­ments to qual­i­fy for Gate to the rel­e­vant au­thor­i­ties. He said the school comes at a time when the gov­ern­ment is mov­ing to di­ver­si­fy the econ­o­my and de­vel­op un­der ser­viced ar­eas as avi­a­tion. Karim said Cam­den could al­so be a place to de­vel­op an avi­a­tion ser­vice clus­ter and an al­ter­nate land­ing strip for com­mer­cial air­crafts. He said such a fa­cil­i­ty is need­ed for na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty rea­sons and in times of nat­ur­al dis­as­ters.

Ramesh Lutch­me­di­al, Di­rec­tor Gen­er­al of the Civ­il Avi­a­tion Au­thor­i­ty of T&T, said the ini­tial avi­a­tion train­ing would be done at Pi­ar­co. How­ev­er, Lutch­me­di­al forsees prob­lems tak­ing place at Pi­ar­co be­cause that air­port has on­ly one land­ing strip. He said com­mer­cial flights tak­ing off and land­ing cou­pled with train­ing flights at Pi­ar­co's sin­gle run­way could cre­ate con­ges­tion. Lutch­me­di­al said Cam­den could al­so be used to op­er­ate an air taxi ser­vice from Trinidad to To­ba­go and the re­gion.