Bristow helicopters, a leading provider of helicopter services to the world wide offshore energy industry, may have hit over $24million in five years as the airline again, sent another 16 cadet pilots for training at the Nigeria College of Aviation Technology (NCAT), Zaria, International College of Aviation, Ilorin and Florida in the United States of America (USA).

   It is the first civil helicopter transport company to work in the oil and gas industry, providing exceptional transportation, production management and related services for more than 50 years.

      Femi Collins, Bristow human resources general manager disclosed at a conference in Lagos while kicking off the 2013 manpower training programme that a total of 16 Nigerians, including three women would be trained with at least $300,000 as pilots training  programme.

      According to him, Bristow has successfully over the years, contributed to the local content programme in the aviation industry by consecutively sending graduates abroad for training on pilots and engineers adding that there is no way the money expended on these Nigerians will be wasted as long as they have Nigerians as families, CEOAFRICA explained.

      Some of the carefully selected persons have no aviation background and they will be sent to NCAT for eight weeks, they will proceed to Bristow Academy in Florida thereafter for further training. Those who have aviation knowledge will be sent to the US directly and will be there for two months until they are fully trained as pilots.

Furthermore, Femi Collins said “this is our contribution to the ‘Nigerianisation of manpower’ we have continually done this for many years. We hope that by this step. These successful Nigerians will become useful asset to the country as a whole. Our target is to have 100percent Nigerians pilots because we still have a lot of expatriates. We have robust succession plan pilots and engineers; when they come back from training, we ensure that they are developed into managers of companies,” he told BusinessDay newspaper.

      On the growing need for more pilots, Collins said ‘’the helicopter market is increasing; there will always be a need to train more because we do not have enough locals. We have a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with NCAT where we send a minimum of 12persons for training, right now, we have 36 Nigerians there and another 20 are waiting to go to the college. We have also elected to send trainer helicopter to the school and volumes of text books.’’