Emirates Flight Training Academy

Creating An Inspiring Brand For The Emirates Pilots Of Tomorrow

About This Project

A worldwide shortage of pilots combined with a growing fleet size, Emirates Airline had a challenge at hand. As such Emirates launched Emirates Flight Training Academy (EFTA), a purpose-built learning facility dedicated to training the pilots of tomorrow.

The brief was to develop the new EFTA brand, from strategic inception of idea to final creative executions. This included developing the new brand’s positioning platform, crafting its unique visual language and comprehensive guidelines and lastly, branding its environment as an inspiring journey throughout the academy, from the atrium to auditorium, classrooms to corridors, receptions to residential blocks.

Creating An Inspiring Brand For The Emirates Pilots Of Tomorrow

Strategic

EFTA’s brand positioning was developed through brand audit and positioning exercises. Interactive workshops with key stakeholders, extensive research and visual audits of the aviation-education industry revealed insights that formed the foundation for EFTA’s brand positioning.

Understanding how important the right instructional education is for a cadet’s success and how the aviation-education industry today is visually a homogenous landscape, the objective was to develop a positioning platform that enables EFTA to stand out and become synonymous with dedication, excellence and collaboration.

Formulating different elements of EFTA’s brand strategy, from brand values to benefits, it is the brand essence – Go Beyond – that continues to inspire all stakeholders and guide the verbal and visual communication.

Creative Solution

‘Go Beyond’ being the overarching principle, EFTA’s creative expression is inspired by biomimicry — an approach to innovation that seeks to find solutions to human challenges by emulating nature’s strategies. In the case of EFTA’s visual language, flight paths of birds, which for centuries have inspired aviators, was the driving idea.

Supporting the visual language is a colour palette that is reminiscent of the luminous colours a pilot experiences from the cockpit and a typography family that is prevalent in the transportation sector; resulting in a brand identity system that has a strong, substantiated presence.

EFTA’s visual language extends into its environment and is propelled by various elements. From designs that fuse the visual language and brand values, to walls with aspirational quotes by pioneering aviators, from iconic celestial imagery running through the building to fascinating images of Emirates’ destinations; EFTA’s environment inspires, ignites and brings to life ‘Go Beyond’.