“If Warren Buffet doesn’t think it’s a good idea, why do you?” That was what his chairman asked Skyborne Airline Academy founder Lee Woodward when he suggested acquiring a Florida training school from FlightSafety International – a company owned by the famous billionaire investor.
Like any chairman doing his job, Woodward’s colleague at the Gloucestershire Airport-based flight school was playing devil’s advocate. But he had a point. The nonagenarian Sage of Omaha is not known for making bad business calls.
Not only that, but it was early 2021, in the depths of the pandemic. With aircraft grounded the world over and tens of thousands of pilots furloughed, the profession’s very future was in doubt.
FlightSafety, one of the world’s leading aviation training specialists, had decided that the ab initio market was non-strategic and was keen to offload the Vero Beach establishment, which dates from the mid-1960s and has capacity for around 370 students.
Three-and-a-half years on, the Skyborne founder’s decision to take his young business stateside has proved a winner. After extensively refurbishing the somewhat faded campus – and with demand for pilot training soaring in the UK as well as North America – Woodward is growing again.
The business has been bolstered by an expanded partnership with British Airways – which announced at July’s Farnborough air show that it is to open its sponsored Speedbird cadet scheme to 200 more aspiring pilots, all of whom will train with Skyborne.
LUCRATIVE DEALS
As a result, and with the likelihood of further lucrative airline deals down the line, Woodward is looking at doubling the size of his UK operation, either by extending the current facility or building a second site.
With annual student numbers due to jump to more than 200 from October, the jury is still out. Skyborne has applied for permission to erect an adjacent building at the general aviation airport near Cheltenham. That would have the bonus of keeping all the company’s assets in one location.
On the other hand, renting a property at another UK airport would allow Skyborne to fish from a fresh pool of pilot instructors, who remain in short supply. “There are only so many people in the Cotswolds,” remarks Woodward, who himself began his aviation career as a BA cadet pilot.
He describes the deal with BA, which named Skyborne as its exclusive training partner in September last year, as a “gamechanger” for the firm, which also has agreements with Delta Air Lines, American Airlines affiliate Envoy, Indian airline IndiGo, and SkyWest.
BA’s move was significant in the industry in that it is the flag-carrier’s first sponsored cadet scheme for 25 years. Originally offered to 100 students, each of whom receives £100,000 ($124,000) for accommodation and tuition, it aims to provide a route to the cockpit for under-represented groups.
The initial announcement attracted some 20,000 applicants, which Skyborne helped whittle down through a process of online assessments, video and face-to-face interviews, as well as an assessment day with BA. The first students arrived at the Gloucestershire site earlier this year.
Woodward says BA’s decision to launch the Speedbird initiative and invest a further £21 million on doubling the intake in 2025 has the potential to “drive change in our industry and remove the prohibitive costs that can block the best and brightest from a pilot career”.
It may also, he believes, encourage other airlines to follow suit. “What BA has done has stimulated the market,” he says. “People see BA putting their money where their mouth is and doing something to genuinely help get more pilots into the profession.”
Woodward, who was part of the management team at UK training school CTC until its 2015 takeover by L3Harris, set up Skyborne with a business partner in 2017 with the mission of developing cockpit-ready flightcrew rather than general aviation pilots.
Like all flying schools, Skyborne was hit badly by Covid-19 shutdowns. However, Woodward kept faith that pilot demand would bounce back, securing funding to buy the Vero Beach facility in 2021 and working hard to retain and bring in new airline contracts in the USA, Europe, and further afield.
One of them was Delta, which revealed in March 2023 that it would establish its Delta Propel pilot academy – in co-operation with Skyborne at Vero Beach – with the first candidates starting that June.
Woodward is confident that two more “significant” non-US contracts could follow towards the end of this year, although he will not disclose names. “Our business model is to work closely with as many airlines as possible on developing and running their cadet programmes,” he says.
After establishing the business two years earlier, Skyborne’s first trainees for its flagship Integrated Airline Transport Pilot Licence course arrived at Gloucestershire Airport in April 2019, and earlier this year the firm marked the programme’s fifth anniversary.
The pandemic might have been a year off, but those six self-funding candidates “were taking a big punt”, admits Woodward. He also concedes that the collapse of two UK training academies last year proves that setting up a flight school is no guarantee of success, despite the pilot shortage.
As well as being a centre for North American airlines’ training programmes, Vero Beach – a college-style campus with 200 bedrooms, bookshops, a swimming pool, and a soccer field – works in tandem with Gloucestershire, allowing UK-based students to do fair weather training in sunnier climes.
The Florida facility is currently by far the larger of the two, housing 370 trainees compared with 140 in Gloucestershire, where most students live in halls of residence in Cheltenham. However, Woodward says expansion in the UK will see that ratio moving closer to parity in the next few years.
In terms of equipment, the Gloucestershire site has three Diamond twin-prop DA42s as well as two DA42 simulators and a Boeing 737 Max machine, although growth plans could mean all those numbers doubling.
Meanwhile, Vero Beach has an all-Piper fleet of around 45 PA-28 Warriors and PA-44 Seminoles, many of which are being replaced by the latest version of the PA-28, the 100i, three of which have been delivered. There are also five single-engine simulators and one multi-engine device.
ELECTRIC DEVELOPMENTS
Additionally, with a view to cutting carbon emissions, Skyborne has placed orders for 40 eFlyers from Colorado-based electric aircraft developer Bye Aerospace to be operated at Vero Beach, although the type is yet to go into production.
Skyborne’s trainees come from a wide range of backgrounds. While traditionally many would-be airline pilots have begun flying after studying at university, Woodward says the cost and perceived value of today’s degrees are prompting many to apply straight from high school.
That places a lot of responsibility for their welfare on Skyborne. “Like those going to university, many of them are 18-year-olds who have never lived away from home. We take our duty of care obligation very seriously,” he says.
The company also offers students an option to do an academic degree with the University of West London alongside their flight training. Around 40% go down this route, says Woodward, as it gives them a fallback if they fail a medical, and allows them to access government-backed student loans.
While the business Woodward worked for previously, Southampton-based CTC, offered type-rating training alongside ab initio programmes, Skyborne does not currently operate any full-flight simulators (FFS).
However, moving into the FFS market is “one of our stated goals”, says Woodward, because it would make it easier to conduct multicrew pilot licence programmes that involve an initial type rating. The business currently outsources such requirements.
Woodward attributes Skyborne’s survival through the pandemic and beyond to “boxing clever and managing the business smartly to make sure we have been masters of our own destiny”. He holds a stake in the company along with several private investors, but there is no overall owner.
While some saw Covid-19 as a trough the industry would struggle to climb out of, Woodward says long experience in the industry led him to believe that – as with other once-a-decade black swan moments: the first Gulf war, 9/11, and the financial crisis – recovery would come quicker than expected.
“I’d seen enough of these global shocks to know in my heart that the pandemic would soon be over,” he says. “Aviation is resilient.”
