Skyborne flies high to meet growing global demand for pilot training

Interview by Nicky Godding. First appeared in the September 2024 issue of The Business Magazine South West & West Midlands

According to Airbus, the world’s top commercial aeroplane manufacturer, over the next 20 years the aviation industry will need more than 585,000 pilots (and more than 640,000 technicians and engineers) to meet an ever-growing demand for flight. 

Where will all these pilots come from? This country’s government doesn’t support any pilot training initiatives, and UK banks dont’ offer student loans to those wanting to learn to fly. Until very recently it has been a career mostly for those with deep pockets, or fortunate enough to find a sponsor willing to bankroll them to the tune of around £100,000 each. 

One man who feels the deep iniquity of this is Lee Woodward, co-founder and CEO of Skyborne Airline Academy, which has its headquarters and a training academy at Gloucestershire Airport. It has a second at Vero Beach in Florida. Jointly, the academies train hundreds of pilots every year. And such is the demand that Skyborne is expanding. 

Lee set up Skyborne Airline Academy in 2016, with entrepreneur Tom Misner, who is now the academy’s chairman. In the 1970s, Tom established the world’s largest chain of audio engineering schools, selling it in 2010 for more than $300 million Australian dollars. 

Lee said: “Tom’s school had more than 45,000 students around the world training in audio engineering, media and music production. These were his passions – but so was education.” 

Lee knows all about passion. Did he always want to be a pilot? “Always, always, always – from as young as I can remember. And I only ever wanted to be a commercial pilot, as much as I loved military aircraft.” 

A clear view of the horizon 

He remembers the moment his career path became clear. “As a young child, I’d go to Manchester Airport to watch the aeroplanes. One day I saw a crew walking out to a Dan Air 727 and climb up the steps. I just knew then that’s what I wanted to do.” 

But coming from a working-class background, Lee thought it was a pipe dream. It was an inspirational maths teacher at his comprehensive school in Widnes that suggested it could be a reality. 

“He said, if you really want to do this, you can. He took me under his wing, and I never looked back. In 1989, BA announced it would offer 600 pilot training scholarships over a five-year period. There were around 120,000 applications and I was accepted the second year.” 

After completing training with BA, he flew Boeing 757/767 and 747 aircraft before becoming a trainer and examiner. He left BA in 2003 after losing his Class 1 medical and joined the then fledgling pilot training company, CTC Aviation, in Southampton. He later regained his medical. 

Making flying more accessible to everyone 

“I owe everything to that BA scholarship,” He says. “When you remove the funding barrier, you see the quality of candidates go up almost exponentially. Applicant numbers increase between 15 and 20 times so that means the talent pool is so much bigger and we can find the very, very best individuals. If airlines are serious about recruiting the best talent, then they should find a way to fully fund or at least part-sponsor the training.” 

Some are. Last year Skyborne was selected by British Airways to train pilots in its Speedbird Pilot Academy, which provides fully-funded flight training for up to 100 candidates a year. British Airways says that it wants to make a flying career more accessible to a wider selection of people. 

“The applicant numbers for the Speedbird Pilot Academy are enormous,” admits Lee. “We share the contract with Flight Training Europe in Spain, but we are the preferred, and only, UK supplier and will train around 80 or so out of the 100. 

“BA make it a tough selection process, with only around five per cent of applicants successful.” 

In total, including the BA Speedbird contract, Skyborne annually enrols around 170 students to train as pilots at Gloucestershire Airport, and around 300 in Florida. Next year student numbers will rise at both locations – 300 in the UK and 400 in the USA, such is the demand. 

Skyborne employs around 60 people in the UK and just over 200 in the USA, of which 93 are flight instructors. 

It aims to stand out from other training schools in a number of ways. “All our training is delivered in an airline-focused way,” says Lee. 

“We train in an incremental fashion, similar to how Tom did it in his audio engineering business. He called it Progressive Continuous Learning. We have adapted it to suit our training environment. 

“Pilots in ground school are exposed to aircraft and simulator experiences to better contextualise the theoretical phase, and cement their learning. 

“We also take a number of principles that the UK CAA regard as best practice – such as loss of control, runway incursion/excursion, controlled flight into terrain etc, and bring this into the flight school of training.” 

It also puts all trainee pilots through two days of formal customer service training, which Lee says is unique to Skyborne. 

“It's always been a big belief of mine that the pilots should know the full value they bring to their airline. The influence they can have on the passenger experience is still, even behind the locked door, significant. 

“We help our trainees understand that the second they put on uniform they will be viewed as being on duty, even if they’re not.” 

Building a new flying school from scratch 

This isn’t the first time that Lee has built up a pilot training academy. At CTC Aviation, he helped develop the cadet pilot training programme, which became known as “CTC Wings”. 

By 2015 it had become the biggest independent pilot training company in the world and Lee was Director of Business Development and Chief Operating Officer of the largest division in the company. 

Success brought CTC to the attention of a larger business and that year it was bought by L3 Communications in a transaction that valued CTC Aviation at around £140 million. 

Lee could have stayed under the new ownership or returned to flying, but a chance encounter with global entrepreneur Tom Misner offered him the opportunity to establish his own pilot training academy. 

How does Skyborne select its trainee pilots? 

“We look at aptitude and attitude. Pilots complete both psychometric and aptitude assessments, followed by an airline-style, competency-based interview. 

“We want the very best people to come to our training school, but we also have a duty of care to individuals. They, or their sponsors, will spend more than £100,000 on their training. 

“Around 80 percent of our students have parents who will take out a second mortgage and make significant financial commitments to get them through. I am happy to say that 98 per cent of our trainees succeed and all successful trainees get placed in their first job.” 

Lee says Skyborne is unique in the industry to offer Performance Protection. This means that once completing selection, if a student fails in training, the academy will refund everything minus around £10,000, which is a non-refundable deposit. 

“And if students need more training there's no further cost, we cover it all, so it's one fee, that's it. 

“We back our selection process. I think there's nothing worse than students in training being worried about the consequence of failure. So unless the student has committed a gross error, or fails to apply themselves, they will get the refund.” 

A global shortage of pilots 

Skyborne has also invested in its facilities. The academy at Gloucestershire Airport is purpose-built, with training rooms and a large hangar facing onto the airfield. Its site in Vero Beach, Florida is bigger and accommodates all students on site. At the Gloucestershire site, trainees live in Skyborne accommodation in the centre of Cheltenham. “Here they prefer being in a town,” said Lee. 

The biggest challenge for the still young business to date has, not surprisingly, been Covid, when planes across the world were grounded. 

“At that time our students couldn’t see a career pathway, but I kept saying – this will come to an end soon, there will suddenly be a global shortage of pilots. We are in that situation now. And many airlines are still playing catch up.” 

Skyborne bought its Vero Beach site in 2021 from Flight Safety International and was able to continue training there as pandemic restrictions were somewhat more relaxed than in the UK. 

“While we still trained at Gloucestershire Airport, it was a lot tougher and the stress on our staff and students was high.” 

Does Lee miss flying? “I really do, but I’ve been so busy setting up Skyborne in Gloucestershire and Florida, that there’s been little time. I keep my license going and get tested ever year. I’m still a trainer and examiner and I’ve definitely not flown my last flight.” 

Home for Lee is the New Forest, but with two major sites in Gloucestershire and Florida, he doesn’t get as much time with his family there as he would like. “I play tennis and golf, and when I’m at home I get out on the water sailing as much as I can.” 

As we close the interview Lee returns to a main concern, the cost of training. 

“I’d love to find a funding solution to enable more people from all backgrounds to train as pilots, as I was able to do, and we will find one eventually. We’ve got all the statistics to show banks why their risk profile is almost negligible. I won’t give up.”