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The chances of rescuing the Lufthansa commercial pilot school in Bremen, which is threatened with closure and has roughly 120 employees, continue to decrease.
After the classic training has already been suspended due to the reduced need for professional pilots and no more applications have been accepted, the next setback now follows.
According to WELT information, the airline group is relocating the training of the Bundeswehr drone pilots from Bremen to Rostock-Laage Airport.
The Bundeswehr has so far been one of the major customers of the Bremen commercial pilot school.
Lufthansa has just been awarded the contract to continue drone pilot training until at least 2024 with the option of a further four years.
This is now to take place on the Baltic Sea.
"We are not responsible for the drone flights via joystick in the military part", a spokesman for Lufthansa Aviation Training delimits the tasks.
It is the upstream two-year basic flying license.
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The contract that has now been agreed concerns “the acquisition and maintenance of a type rating and instrument flight authorization for manned aircraft”, said a spokesman for the Bundeswehr procurement authority BAAINBw.
Participants in the training are “Remotely Piloted Aircraft Guide”, the technical jargon for drone pilots.
The subsequent drone training is based on the pilot license.
There are no numbers on participants and costs.
Rostock-Laage should be cheaper
One change compared to the training in Bremen has already been determined: the basic training in Rostock-Laage now uses twin-engine propeller aircraft (Diamond 42), while previously in Bremen the practical part was trained on smaller jet models (Citation).
The new regulation should be considerably cheaper.
As it is said in the industry, an hour of flight costs 2500 euros on the jet and 400 euros on the propeller model.
In addition, the Lufthansa location in Rostock-Laage is not bound by tariffs.
Lufthansa has been training Bundeswehr pilots for decades, for example for transport aircraft, as well as for basic training for A400M pilots or for flight readiness.
In the case of the Bundeswehr, it is said that, according to a profitability study, awarding the contract to a company in the private sector is cheaper than buying and operating training aircraft yourself.
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The range of deployment of the Bundeswehr drone pilots and thus also the training could change in the future.
Because there has long been an endeavor that the aircraft can also be used by Bundeswehr soldiers not only for reconnaissance missions, but also for armed use.
However, the SPD parliamentary group had recently spoken out against arming the drones and thus triggered heated political discussions.
A spokesman for Lufthansa Aviation Training said that the fate of the Bremen pilot school has not yet been decided.
Against the background of the shrinking course the company is on, the dream of becoming a pilot has already burst for many participants at the Bremen school.
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“Everything on shares” is the daily stock market shot from the WELT business editorial team. Every morning from 7 a.m. with the financial journalists Moritz Seyffarth and Holger Zschäpitz. For stock market experts and beginners. Subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Amazon Music and Deezer. Or directly via RSS feed.