Ryanair has announced plans to build a training centre in Kraków. The carrier, which is Poland’s largest by passenger numbers, will spend around 600 million zloty (€134 million) on the facility, creating 150 jobs.
It is the Irish airline’s fifth such centre in Europe, but its first in the Central and Eastern Europe region. The facility will be used to train pilots, flight attendants and mechanics from across the continent.
#Krakow #inwestycje ✈️ @Ryanair wybuduje w Krakowie największe centrum symulatorowo-treningowe w Europie Centralnej. Inwestycja warta będzie 600 mln zł i wygeneruje dodatkowych 150 miejsc pracy. Budowa rozpocznie się na początku 2024 r.
📷 @BSKrakow @krakow_pl pic.twitter.com/WAQIEYbiYn
— Kraków (@krakow_pl) June 13, 2023
“Kraków is our largest base in this part of Europe,” said Michał Kaczmarzyk, head of Ryanair’s Polish subsidiary, Buzz. Ryanair accounts for around 55% of traffic at the city’s airport.
In Poland as a whole, it transported around 14.5 million passengers last year, almost twice as many as Polish flag carrier LOT, notes Business Insider Polska.
Construction of the training centre – which will be equipped with 10 flight simulators, including the first Boeing 737-8200 simulators in Poland – is due to begin in early 2024. It will be operational by 2025 and at full capacity in 2026.
Ryanair already employs around 500 people at Kraków airport and has nine planes based there. Last year, the airline announced its biggest ever investment in the city, worth $800 million.
Ryanair has announced its biggest ever investment in Kraków, worth $800 million.
The airline, which is Poland's largest carrier by passenger numbers, will operate 73 routes – including 10 new ones – from the city this summer https://t.co/blrc9Gc4L2
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) April 25, 2022
“Such cooperation is mutually beneficial and strengthens Kraków’s image as a city open to innovative business and friendly to investors,” said mayor Jacek Majchrowski today, quoted by the Rzeczpospolita daily.
“We are convinced that this investment will have a positive impact on business and tourism in Kraków and the entire Małopolska region [in which Kraków is located],” added Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary.
While welcomed by Kraków’s local authorities, O’Leary has regularly clashed with those implementing the national government’s flagship project to a “mega-airport” in central Poland.
The outspoken Ryanair boss has called those plans “incomprehensible” and the politicians behind them “very stupid”. However, the government has defended the plans as necessary and beneficial.
The Polish government's planned mega-airport was conceived by “very stupid politicians”, says the CEO of Ryanair, Poland's biggest airline by passenger numbers.
The head of the project says it would be a "waste of time" to respond to O'Leary's comments https://t.co/c0KmZrDGzU
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) February 9, 2023
Main image credit: Anna Zvereva/Flickr (under CC BY-SA 2.0)
Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.
