PETALING JAYA: Airlines should actively foster relations with flight academies to prepare pilots for the real world of flying, said Malaysia Airlines’ first Malay pilot Captain Hassan Ahmad.
Hassan, 80, said the network would provide a win-win situation to the airline and potential pilots to jointly benefit the airline industry.
“Compared to my time, there was no flying academy, examinations and training had to be conducted overseas and many did not know of the workings of aviation.
“Compared to the present, we now have everything. So it should benefit potential pilots by giving them exposure to experience the real world. It would be helpful to them,” he told Bernama at the “Reunion MH Friends Night 2016” at the Subang Golf Club near here tonight.
Sharing his experience, Hassan, who hailed from Penang and raised in Kuala Lumpur, said he was interested in flying since his school days before he was accepted as a flight cadet.
He was later given the opportunity to fly small aeroplanes when he was 14 before undergoing training, examinations and later appointed as captain.
“I was not aware of being the first Malay pilot of MAS. It was because I started from the bottom in MAS which was then known as Malay Airways Limited, later as Malaysia Singapore Airlines which eventually split into two... Singapore International Airlines and Malaysia Airlines System.
“Experience made me and my crew and staff mature. There was nothing special. I worked and followed as the training required. It never struck me to become a captain as it was all hardwork,” he said.
The reunion event held since last year was attended by 170 former MAS employees including the pioneer group who started their service in 1971.
Among them were former MAS Flight Operation clerk C.Pathmanaban, 63, who said his generation had to make many sacrifices in the airline industry to make MAS known internationally.
A couple who met while working in MAS, Ashok Kumar, 70, and Amarjeet Kumar, 64, described MAS as a platform to serve the nation with the best service to all passengers.
Meanwhile, former MAS managing director Datuk Kamaruddin Ahmad said he hoped the event would become a platform to reconnect relations with one another in whatever fields, departments and service of the national airlines. --Bernama
