The Aviators Africa Academy was launched in Lagos in April 2018 by Jon Howell, Managing Director of AviaDev and Toni Ukachukwu, founder and editor of Aviators Africa magazine.
It aims to engage and inspire the next generation of African aviators by providing education and connecting students to internship, training and job opportunities.
For our Ghana event, we partnered with gh-aviation and its energetic and inspiring founder, Elizabeth Sasu. Through our combined efforts we brought over 130 students aged 16-25, actively studying aviation related courses to the Accra International Conference Centre. Some travelled 6 hours by bus just to be with us.
(Picture of Lizzy handing over plane)
What was incredibly encouraging was that, in a traditionally male dominated industry, over 75% of the attending students were female.
The event was sponsored by Africa’s largest airline, Ethiopian Airlines, who have the largest training institution in Africa and have supported the initiative since inception.
Our esteemed line-up of speakers included a pilot with 16,500 flying hours (that’s almost 2 years solid flying!), the regional manager of Ethiopian Airlines and the regional general manager of South African Airlines, in addition to a youthful line-up of young Ghanaians who are busy leasing aeroplanes and setting up airlines.
We then broke into smaller groups to conduct a practical activity- namely create a model plane using card, scissors and tape and we were amazed by quality of the creations.
Bench Events kindly sponsored the lunch of locally sourced chicken jollof rice for the 130 participants.
For more information about Aviators Africa Academy and how to get involved, please visit: http://aviatorsafricaacademy.com/
