News / SASI partners-up to establish air cargo training base in the UAE

SASI World is preparing to establish a permanent home for its training classes for the air cargo industry in the United Arab Emirates.

The UAE’s civil aviation authority has signalled its support, said SASI president and CEO Stan Wraight. SASI is looking to launch the centre this autumn with a view to starting classes early in 2025.

The company has partnered with Dynamic Advanced Training (DAT), which has been running courses for flight crew since its inception in 2020. Its courses include crew resource management, leadership and management soft skills, and flight crew training, utilising two full flight simulators through a partnership with Ansett Aviation Training, conveniently located next door.

Beyond giving SASI a fixed base for training, the partnership also envisages some joint marketing initiatives. In addition, SASI can use DAT’s back office functions as it gets started.

“We buy these services as needed,” said SASI VP Charles Edwards, adding that the relationship with DAT was be transactional initially but is expected to morph into a more relational alignment over time.

Mark Kammer, DAT’s operations director, sees ample room for the pair to develop synergies.

“The scope and expertise of both companies are complementary to each other,” he said. “Partnership of SASI and Dynamic can create a holistic logistics/supply chain training curriculum that covers all aspects of aviation operations, from logistics to flight management.”

He added that there is “great promise for growth through this partnership” not only in the Middle East but also in Asia, Africa and even Europe.

Over the years SASI has developed a broad array of classes. Recent additions have been a sustainability module and a course to educate people on airport cargo community systems.

Mr Wraight stressed the need in the air cargo industry for more education, as opposed to training. The latter teaches specific skills, whereas education is required for people to understand needs for processes and equipment, he explained

“You need to educate first and then define training afterwards,” he said, noting that this applied not only to new recruits and blue collar labour.

“One of the biggest problems with digitisation is to get management buy-in for training. They all operate in silos,” he said. “People are not educated on why we go to digitisation, and what the benefits are.”

SASI has also developed programmes more geared to education, including an ‘air cargo professional advancement’ course. A key plank of the programme is mixing people from different functions and organisations to allow cross-fertilisation of ideas and better understanding of the impact of developments like digitisation on other segments of the supply chain.

Mr Edwards stressed the need for the air cargo industry to look more at other industries.

“We don’t look outside the box. We don’t look at best practices that are not aviation-related, but could be adjusted to air cargo,” he said, adding that cargo owners were educating their staff on artificial intelligence – unlike transport companies.