Tucked away inside a massive Central Park warehouse is the latest addition to United's massive flight training center -- the largest in the world. The facility already hosts around 80,000 trainings for its staff per year, and on Thursday, the airline opened up a new wing of the center.
The facility butts up against some Denver aviation history, originally built to be near Denver's original Stapleton Airport. The site includes eight buildings with 46 flight simulators. The expanded facility comes as the airline sets its sights on expansion; United hired 2,300 pilots nationwide in 2023 and 300 pilots so far this year.
United CEO Scott Kirby attributed the growth to the airline's approach during the pandemic.
While some industry experts predicted that the travel industry would never recover, Kirby said United set its sights on expansion in preparation for travel opening back up. While the airline was hit hard during the pandemic shutdown, that bet ultimately paid off, with the travel industry seeing massive demand in the past two years.
United greenlit the plans for the $145 million building in the summer of 2020.
"It was a once in history opportunity for us to leapfrog everyone else and move to a leadership position," Kirby said at a ribbon cutting Thursday.
With the new center will come even more United jobs.
Already the state's largest private employer, the airline expects the expanded center to create more than 370 new jobs in Denver. United also estimates it will spend more than $65 million on hotel rooms in the city for pilots visiting the facility for training. Overall, United plans to hire more than 1,000 people in Denver this year.
"We are very proud of the fact that there are more than 10,000 United employees right now who call Denver home," said Mayor Mike Johnston on Thursday.
And training is not United's only expansion in Denver. The airline announced last year that it was adding 35 flights, six routes, 12 gates and more than a thousand new jobs to Denver International Airport, making DIA one of United's largest in the U.S. In August, the airline laid out plans to buy 113 acres of land in the city for training.
All that expansion comes alongside the Denver airport's plans to add four new concourses and 100 more gates by 2045.
