Hello Madam Chair and committee members. It's an honour to be here today on behalf of CAE to provide our perspectives on pilot training in Canada and abroad.
I'll give a bit of a history lesson. In 1939, in conjunction with its allies, Canada established the British Commonwealth air training plan, or BCATP. Located in communities across Canada, the BCATP trained more that 130,000 crew men and women over a six-year period, which is considered today one of Canada's great contributions to allied victory. Today our nation's history in pilot training and our strong aerospace sector remain some of our greatest national assets. Successive governments have identified flight training as a key industrial capability.
Building on the BCATP heritage, CAE was founded in 1947 by Mr. Ken Patrick, an ex-Royal Canadian Air Force officer, who had a goal to create something Canadian and take advantage of a war-trained team that was extremely innovative and very technology intensive.
Fast forward to today. We're now the world leader in training for civil, defence and health care professionals. With over 65 training locations, we have the largest civil aviation training network in the world. Each year, we train more than 220,000 civil and defence crew members, including more than 135,000 pilots. Most people don't realize it, but wherever you're travelling, chances are the pilots were either trained at CAE in a simulator we built right here in Canada, or in a training centre located somewhere in the world.
Although the number of pilots we train annually is impressive, it is far from being sufficient to meet current and future needs. In 2018, we released a pilot demand outlook. According to our analysis, by 2028 the active combined airline and business jet pilot population will exceed half a million pilots, and 300,000 of those pilots will be new. Many military pilots are choosing a career in the commercial sector. Some of the driving factors are quality of life and better pay and opportunities. Military pilot attrition is also having a significant impact on professional air forces, reducing their ability to maintain a cadre of pilots to meet operational requirements, as well as their ability to produce qualified flight instructors to support their training pipelines. We see this impact today on the military training programs we deliver right here in Canada.
In this context, maximizing the available pool of potential talent is more important than ever. Today, women make up only 5% of professional pilots and cadets worldwide. Tackling gender diversity would address that imbalance, while giving the aviation community access to a talent pool nearly twice its current size.
In a recent survey that we conducted of aviation students and cadets in Canada and abroad, a number of issues were raised consistently, including the significant financial burden placed on students to enter into pilot training as well as the lack of certainty in career outcomes when they make that investment. Women specifically raised concerns about being able to fit in a male-dominated world and have an appropriate work-life balance. The fact that they have very few female role models in aviation does not help to mitigate their concerns.
Faced with such a shortage, our industry is looking for solutions to help develop more pilots faster. We'll do this by building new types of partnerships between fleet operators and training providers to provide better links between flight schools and the airlines that will ultimately receive these students. New training systems that make better use of real-time data and analytics are facilitating a move towards competency-based training. We are taking advantage of AI and big data analytics.