Lufthansa Flight Training is again training dispatchers
February 19, 2003
Again this year the Flight Operations Academy of Lufthansa Flight Training (LFT) is offering an attractive training program. The third training course for dispatchers will start in Frankfurt on February 19th. The 23 participants, including seven women, will spend more than a year being schooled in all theoretical and practical aspects of their new profession. Their goal: earning the dispatcher's license issued by Germany's LBA (Civil Aviation Administration). That license opens many doors, says Jörn Sellhorn-Timm, director of the Flight Operations Academy: "It's simply a must for anyone who wants to become a flight-operations controller, for example."

Before starting the actual course, the future dispatchers spend six weeks being familiarized with the various operating departments of airlines and airports. These add up to fourteen different stations ranging from the hub control center to a modern flight-operations center to an MRO operation. After that, the participants attend classes at LFT's commercial-pilots school in Bremen in preparation for the written examination on theory. There the range of subjects dovetails with those of the training course for Lufthansa pilots. The dispatcher course ends with six months of on-the-job training at some well-known airline like LTU, Hapag-Lloyd or Lufthansa.

The employment prospects of these future dispatchers are bright indeed, confirms Jörn Sellhorn-Timm: "We know from a number of airlines that they're looking for qualified people."

With its Flight Operations Academy, Lufthansa Flight Training offers to airports and airlines a unique curriculum for the initial and advanced training of flight-operations personnel. That curriculum ranges from the training of qualified dispatchers to team-resource-management training to the training of experts in specialties like ETOPS and crisis management. For the 23 graduates of the 2003 dispatcher course this means that they can keep right on refreshing and broadening their knowledge indefinitely.

< back to overview