Wait times for international student visas are jeopardising New Zealand's flight training industry - costing the country hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

According to Aviation NZ, some visas take up to sixty days to process, a timeframe desperately longer than its competitor nations like Australia and Canada and has meant students took their studies elsewhere.

Aviation NZ, the peak body for the commercial aviation sector, has taken up the matter with INZ and has written to new Immigration and Education Minister Erica Stanford seeking urgent action.

INZ deputy chief operating officer Jeannie Melville said it had engaged extensively with Aviation NZ and was continuing to do so.

Chief executive, Simon Wallace told Summer Breakfast the typical wait time for an international student coming through New Zealand's border to receive their visa was thirty days.

"We're seeing processing times from our competitor countries, Australia for example, is doing it in three to five working days and Canada and the US are certainly doing it in a lot less time than we are," he said.

"So, what was a very lucrative market pre-Covid when we had six hundred and fifty students in New Zealand a year, that market dropped last year to less than a hundred students. So, the visa processing times are at the heart of this and it's putting at threat a really very lucrative international student market."

Considering the expense required to learn to fly, Wallace was asked what a reasonable timeframe would be for a student to wait for their visa to be processed - to which the chief executive said it needed to be better than a month.

He said the revenue from flight training would reach $200 million per annum, students will often bring their families over which would contribute to the country's economy.

"These flight training schools are in regional areas of New Zealand so they're delivering economic value all around the country. We've got to get those processing times up to where Australia has," he said.

Asked why visa numbers dropped, Wallace explained that over recent years several immigration offices had closed down. He said it was a priority that never got sorted and that the Government needed to take another look at reopening some of the offices again.

More offices would offer support to students coming from popular international student markets like Vietnam, India and the Middle East.

"There needs to be more of a wraparound service to help these students and there should be no reason why we can't implement these things," said Wallace.

"We've been working with immigration on this for some time but we're banging our heads against a brick wall."

It was suggested to Wallace by Summer Breakfast host Tim Dower that the issue might be a matter of prioritising other workforces like in the health sector, which Wallace said he understood but didn't remove the importance of working on the international studying markets.

He said it's providing jobs for engineers and those working in supply lines.

"We need to be open for business in this post-Covid environment, we're getting a lot of reputational damage done to New Zealand and overseas markets because we're just not up to speed around something as simple as visa processing times."

National has promised to revive international education by fast-tracking visa processing for international students who pay additional fees.

It also said during last year’s election campaign that the hours international students could work would be increased from 20 to 24.