THE booming air travel industry could hit a snag if changes are not made to the training schemes to ease an impending pilot shortage.

Sounding the alarm, the International Air Transport Association (Iata) - a grouping of 240 airlines worldwide - said about 17,000 pilots will be needed every year to fill the cockpits.

Experts estimate that from now until 2025, airlines around the world will need to hire more than 300,000 new pilots to fly all the new jets - about 19,000 - expected to join the fleet by then; and replace retirees and others who leave.

For the industry to meet the challenges of a buoyant market, airlines and regulators must change the pilot training programmes and impose global training standards, Iata director general and chief executive officer Giovanni Bisignani said on Thursday at the Federal Aviation Administration ( FAA) International Safety Forum in Washington, United States.

He said: 'It is time to ring the warning bell....Pilot training has not changed in 60 years. We are still ticking boxes with an emphasis on flight hours.'

While raising the mandatory retirement age for pilots from 60 to 65 years will help mitigate the shortage, Mr Bisignani said it is no enough.

The industry must embrace new multi-crew pilot licensing training programme, which was endorsed by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (Icao) last year.

Unlike the traditional training path which focuses on actual flying and prepares a pilot for solo flying, the new programme is more aircraft-focused and simulator-based.

Mr Bisignani said: 'Our goal is to increase the pool of candidates and training capacity while improving standards.'

To do this, Iata will host a database to track the progress of pilots certified under the new training programme which countries in Europe as well as Australia and China have adopted.

China will need about 2,000 new pilots a year in the next five years - more than 1,000 short of the number it is now able to produce - to support a 12-14 per cent annual growth in air traffic growth. The new training programme should help ease the situation.

Other countries including Singapore, are more cautious.

Singapore Airlines (SIA), which has facilities in Australia to train pilots from scratch, has about 200 cockpit crew being trained at any one time, spokesman Stephen Forshaw told The Straits Times.

On whether the airline supports the multi-crew training path, he said: 'Of course we are open to considering changes which make pilot training more efficient while not compromising on the ultimate goal of safety and knowledge.'

Technological advancements in flying are also showing in simulator design and operation, so the new generation of simulators are as close to the real thing as can be, he said.

But change takes time, Mr Forshaw said, adding that in the end, 'regulators will need to be convinced that the new programmes can achieve the same goal of preserving and even improving safe aircraft operations.'

Captain P. James, president of the Air Line Pilots Association-Singapore (Alpa-S) echoed the sentiment.

He said: 'Safety is paramount and at the end of the day, the new training programme, which is still very much in the developmental stage, will need to be evaluated to assess the quality of the pilots that come out of the system.'