By Hussain Hazzazi

Okaz/Saudi Gazette

JEDDAH — There are around 100,000 direct employment opportunities in the civil aviation sector in the Kingdom. This information was contained in a study carried out by the International Air Transport Association (IATA), according to Ibrahim Al-Rousaa, spokesman of the General Authority of Civil Aviation (GACA).

Speaking to Okaz/Saudi Gazette, he said that GACA makes available large numbers of indirect jobs at airports in addition to investment and service sectors.

“It was revealed in the study that there are around 427,000 indirect job opportunities for Saudis in the aviation and its associated sectors, including tourism, and there has been a huge increase in these numbers in the recent past,” he said.

Al-Rousaa said that it is difficult to determine the percentage of jobs available in the Kingdom’s civil aviation sector accurately in view of the fact that these jobs include both direct and indirect ones.

“The direct jobs are distributed among employees in the civil aviation, airports, national airlines, aviation agencies and ground services companies. Saudi Arabia has been working at an accelerated pace to develop its airport network to cope with the steady increase in air traffic by investing billions of riyals so as to become a global logistics hub connecting the continents of the world and receiving millions of tourists annually by the year 2020,” he added.