Air One crews to practice on Lufthansa Flight Training simulators

April 30, 2003

The Boeing 737 cockpit crews of the Italian airline Air One will be training in future on the flight simulators of Lufthansa Flight Training (LFT). The two companies signed an agreement to this effect in Rome on 16 April 2003. "LFT offers us high-quality training on favorable terms," says flight captain Ubaldo Tufi, chief of Air One's fleet of B737-200s, 300s and 400s. "This is what sets it apart from the other European providers."

The Rome-based carrier has opted for both wet-lease and dry-lease training. For type ratings for its B737-300 crews it is going with wet-lease training, in which LFT instructors will teach the crews how to fly that aircraft type. Four crews will begin their training in Bremen on 7 May.

In addition, starting on 4 June, the Italian airline's B737-300 and -400 crews will be traveling to Bremen regularly to sharpen their flying skills in LFT's full-flight simulators. For these recurrent and refresher training sessions the Lufthansa code-share partner, which has twenty B737-300s and -400s in its fleet, has opted for a dry-lease arrangement using its own instructors.

Like all LFT full-flight simulators, its B737 simulators are certified for zero flight-time training and follow the master-aircraft concept, i.e. simulate an actual B737 in the Lufthansa fleet. Every system upgrade in the master aircraft is matched by a corresponding upgrade in the simulator, which is thus always up-to-the-minute.

"Even when the systems environment in a specific aircraft type in some respects differs significantly at individual airlines, every airline can be certain that with us their crews will be trained in strict accordance with their own standards," says Dirk Deutsch, cockpit-training sales manager at LFT. "We adapt our simulators to meet the specific requirements of each airline, taking full account of their special needs. This includes the ability to modify our B737 simulators to match a B737's original condition when acquired from Boeing."

A wholly owned subsidiary of Lufthansa German Airlines, Lufthansa Flight Training has more than 50 years of experience in training cockpit and cabin crews. In addition to Lufthansa, many other well-known airlines look to LFT for training in emergency and service procedures, simulator training as well as for computer-based and Web-based training.

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