Boeing Co., which already provides some pilot training to more than 400 airlines around the globe, has started offering more-realistic and advanced simulator techniques to carriers that lack the size, finances or expertise to develop their own.

The initiative, spelled out by Sherry Carbary, vice president of Boeing Flight Services, in an interview Tuesday at the Paris Air Show, uses flight data culled from real-life incidents or emergencies to create more-realistic training scenarios. Most big, top-tier airlines already do this based on flight-data retrieved from their fleet, but now Boeing seeks to enhance safety and save carriers money by using its resources to transfer the same techniques to many other carriers.

"It's in its infancy, and it's growing fast," said Carbary, who declined to say how many airlines are participating. "It's a very positive thing for the industry, because training is a very expensive for the airlines."

Boeing Training and Flight Services, a unit of Chicago-based Boeing's commercial airplanes division, provides training to 440 airlines each year for Boeing and non-Boeing fleets in 18 locations in 12 countries. The unit invested a "large amount of money, time and knowledge" in the past year to develop proprietary software to help differently-sized airlines with varying levels of pilot experience achieve a common standard for mandatory recurrent training, said Roei Ganzarski, Boeing's chief customer officer of flight services.

"We're converting their data into distilled information and then into training," said Ganzarski. "It's much more cost effective. It's much more efficient."

Regulators and outside safety experts increasingly see such incident-based training, designed to be updated as new flight events occur, as an essential way to ensure pilot proficiency. But for many carriers, the cost and effort to devise training packages tailored to their individual operations amounts to a big drain.

"It's a very expensive proposition to track the data and then, more importantly, to turn that data into knowledge that you can use into intelligent information that you can then use to drive training," Ganzarski said.

The global financial crisis and the ensuing recession combined with high fuel costs have forced airlines to look for ways to pare their costs, which means redefining what exactly is their core business.

"Airlines make money flying passengers and cargo from one airport to another, not by doing training," said Ganzarski. "The training is something that's required to do it efficiently and safely. Training, maybe, isn't core."