Flight school operations have been halted at the Asian Academy of Aeronautics as all the training aircraft are grounded. Towards the last couple of weeks, only 1-3 aircraft were available for the students to fly.
From the 14 aircraft at the flying school, 9 aircraft would require 1-4 months to be fixed while it is unclear when the remaining 5 aircraft would be fixed.
AAA has blamed the difficulty to acquire USD to get the spare parts as a reason for the delay in maintenance however the government of Maldives has already provided a currency swap of USD 200,000.
Aircraft go through routine maintenance for specific flight hours and time periods. The operator should be able to forecast when they would require additional spare parts for the aircraft and acquire it in time so that non of the aircraft remain grounded.
There is a queue of 50 students just for the multi-engine aircraft alone. The multi-engine rating is the last step towards completing the pilot course.
Just in December 2020, the school went through a period where they had zero aircraft available for students as then the only active two aircraft were grounded for technical reasons.
From December till today, at a maximum, the flight school hardly ever had 3 aircraft for nearly 200 students enrolled. This is well below the minimum requirements for a flight school.
The future remains unclear for the students as the delays keeps adding up while the school has constantly failed to provide a solution.
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