Dev Punj, VP- Chimes Aviation Academy (CAA) on why India’s next aviation export isn’t aircraft but talent

Every one of those aircraft needs someone in the cockpit, and that side of the equation deserves equal credit and attention. Boeing projects India will need roughly 31,000 pilots over the next 20 years, and the country currently produces only just over a thousand licensed pilots a year against that requirement. Airlines, regulators, and training academies are all working hard to close that gap, and progress is real – licence issuances hit a record high in 2025. The question I find myself returning to isn’t whether India can close this gap; it’s what kind of talent India produces once it does and where in the world that talent ends up flying.

What I Have Learned on the Ground

Working closely with India’s pilot training ecosystem has reinforced a conviction I hold strongly: our biggest aviation opportunity isn’t simply expanding fleets – it’s building world-class aviation talent to fly them. At Chimes Aviation Academy, I have had the privilege of watching that transformation unfold in front of my own eyes, with cadets arriving as teenagers with nothing but a dream of flying to seeing them commanding commercial aircraft for airlines in India and overseas.

Training capacity alone tells only half the story – flight schools exist everywhere. What is worth studying is where the graduates end up. Cadets who trained on modern single- and multi-engine aircraft over Dhana and Neemuch now fly a variety of modern aircraft, some with India’s largest carrier, some considerably further afield. One of our alumni, recalling her path from watching aircraft as a child to watching the ground recede from the cockpit for the first time, described that gap as the entire journey worth having. Stories like hers are playing out across academies nationwide, at a scale that’s easy to miss if you’re only looking at the fleet announcements: India has issued over 1,600 Commercial Pilot Licences in the last year alone, and that number is climbing rapidly.

That pattern – an airstrip in Madhya Pradesh producing pilots who go on to fly for carriers with no connection to India at all – is a preview of an export sector nobody has formally named yet. What has changed underneath it is the infrastructure: academies such as ours have built in-house maintenance, standardised fleets, certified quality processes, and direct pipelines into airline hiring, years before “skilling” became a policy talking point. When an academy’s cadets begin appearing on interview shortlists at airlines they never actively marketed themselves to, when a foreign carrier’s recruiter starts asking where a candidate trained – that is, brand equity forming in real time. An institution’s name is beginning to function as a credential in its own right, in the way a handful of global flight schools already command. That reputation is still being built, one batch of cadets at a time, but the trajectory is unmistakable if you spend time in these training pipelines rather than only in the order-book headlines.

The Case for Exporting Talent, Not Just Training It

It would be easy to frame the opportunity narrowly: train enough pilots to staff domestic airlines and call it done. That’s a meaningful goal in its own right, and every academy, airline, and regulator working toward it deserves recognition for the effort. But there’s a more ambitious question worth asking alongside it: why shouldn’t India also position itself as a source of aviation talent for the world – the way it already is for software engineers and finance professionals, roughly 5 million of whom work in India’s IT-BPM sector today?

A few reasons stand out, and none of them are about foreign exchange.

First, talent export builds a longer, stickier form of influence than aircraft purchases ever can. A jet order is a transaction that is complete the moment payment clears. A pilot trained in India and flying for a carrier in Doha or Singapore for the next thirty years is a standing reference for Indian training standards for the length of that career. That reputation compounds in a way a purchase order never does.

Second, it pushes domestic training infrastructure to compete on a global standard rather than a local one – the same pressure that helped Indian IT and pharmaceuticals earn genuine world-class status. An academy training cadets for a global market has every incentive to keep pace with the latest technology and the highest safety benchmarks. Export ambition becomes a quality driver, on top of what strong domestic demand already encourages.

Third, and the point I’d invite every policymaker and airline HR leader to consider: a country that exports pilots, instructors, and eventually maintenance and training expertise builds leverage in future conversations about routes, codeshares, and aviation partnerships. Standards travel with influence attached, in a way raw labour exports rarely carry.

Getting there will take continued effort from everyone in the ecosystem. It will take academies building for a global cadet, not only a domestic one. It will take airlines and regulators, who have already made real strides closing the training gap, treating flight training as an export sector worth cultivating further, much as IT services once was. And it will take a shift in how India tells its own aviation story – placing the people in the cockpit alongside the order books, not behind them.

The aircraft will keep arriving on schedule; that chapter is already being written well. The next one is still open, and it’s being shaped one cadet at a time, on airstrips most of the country has never heard of. If India gets this right, the honest answer to what this country exports to the world of aviation will be the people leading the way.

Dev Punj is the vice president at Chimes Aviation Academy (CAA), India

If you object to the content of this press release, please notify us at pr.error.rectification@gmail.com. We will respond and rectify the situation within 24 hours.