The Ghanaian pilot who historically flew the world’s biggest passenger Aircraft to Accra this week, Captain Solomon Quainoo, has made a passionate appeal to the government to invest more in the country’s aviation industry to help the country produce more local pilots.
According to the Emirates Airline pilot, the high cost of educating and training pilots has contributed to the low number of Ghanaian pilots.
In an interview with Citi News on Wednesday after a visit to his alma mater, the Koforidua Secondary Technical School in the Eastern Region to inspire students and teachers of the school, he expressed concern about the lack of commitment on the path of successive governments in improving the country’s aviation industry.
“In our country aviation has not really developed and it is not because we do not have the resources, we have great guys who can do a lot of things, KNUST guys who produce a lot of engineers who can do great stuff and other brilliant guys, but the opportunities are not here and it is either you go through the air force or you cannot become a pilot,” he said.
He added that;
“I think we need our leaders to be visionary and aim high to make our country great. We have everything, a lot of natural resources that if we sit down and take our time to develop we do not need aid from anyone but our leaders and successive governments have not been what we want them to be. You travel all over the world and there are Ghanaians achieving great things for other countries, we have an old boy in USA who is doing a lot of professional work for NASA and I have done a lot of great stuff for British Airways and other companies so we can do whatever we want to do but we just need the support from government to invest in our kids, schools, teachers, nation as a whole”.
Scofray Nana Yeboah, the President of the Old Students’ Association who was highly motivated by the visit of the pilot said it was time the government made the school a model school.
“For some time now, the old students association have been on a mission to let the government know the kind of products we train here in the school. It is not a mere feat to produce a pilot to captain one of the biggest passenger planes in the world and we want to tell the world we have great minds”.
“We want to use this to make a passionate appeal to government, Sectech is a school that was set up with a mission to raise science and technology based students for Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and that is what we are all about. Here, you are taught real discipline and when you go out there you do not have any option than to excel”.
He added, “so government should use Sectech as a model that if you want to become an outstanding scientist or technologist you come to Sectech, just like how other countries are doing, when you go out we have the MIT which is also a model school designed to train specialists and that is exactly how we want Sectech to be “.
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By: Neil Nii Amatey Kanarku/citinewsroom.com/Ghana
