Air China's - Orient Aviation

MAIN STORYThere is another issue for training centres:hiring enough qualified instructors. Alpha’sPearson said each of its new centres willrequire 36 instructors and the group plansto train its own. “There are problemseverywhere. Look at India. You have anumber of existing flying schools there,some of which have actually had to stopoperations, because they don’t have theinstructors. The instructors have all gone tothe airlines,” he said.India’s civil aviation authorities list 39flight training institutions, 11 privatelyownedand the remainder subsidised bygovernment.Not everyone is pessimistic. Air Indiachairman, Vasudevan Thusalidas, toldOrient Aviation he believed that while thesituation looked confused, in the next threeyears “there should be a reasonable solution”.In the meantime, recruitment of foreignpilots would fill the gap, he added.Like China, regulations in India do notallow for two foreign pilots to work in thecockpit at the same time and there is pressurefrom airlines to have this rule relaxed.Air Deccan chairman, Capt. G. R.Gopinath, has approached the civil aviationministry and asked it to relax rules relatingto the recruitment of foreign pilots.Industry observers warn if Chineseairlines enter the market for foreign pilots ina big way it will make matters even worse.Boeing estimates China will needmore than 2,600 new planes in the next 20years, costing more than US$213 billion.Gao Hongfeng, deputy director general ofthe CAAC, said at a Beijing press conferencein the February the country will buy morethan 100 aircraft a year from 2006 to 2010.That may be an underestimation.Last year, according to CAAC statistics,Zhuhai Flight Training Centre: using nine simulators, the centre trains 400pilots a year, but expects this figure to rise to nearer 700China contracted to purchase 442 aircraftfrom Boeing and Airbus. Although deliveriesare spread out over many years, acquiringenough pilots to fly them will be a realchallenge.China now has a fleet of 863 commercialjets and 11,000 pilots, giving the industrya ratio of pilots-per-aircraft much lowerthan the norm. Based on aircraft deliveries,industry experts have estimated the countrywill need at least 1,600 new pilots every yearto keep up.Yet the CAAC’s Civil Aviation FlightUniversity of China, the nation’s majortraining school for commercial airlinepilots, has been graduating a maximum of‘ Multiple action is neededand some issues are beingaddressed, but mostly it istoo little, too late.’John Bent650 pilots a year.The China Southern West AustralianFlying College in Jandakot, near Perth,Western Australia, (the only Mainlandtraining centre outside China) has increasedits throughput, but still only graduates 200pilots a year.The CAAC university is almost doublingits intake this year to 1,200 pilots. Earlierthis year, the facility graduated its first batchof 12 female pilots, trained for commercialoperations. Nearly all female pilot trainingin the country has been for the military,although a handful have ended up flying fordomestic airlines after leaving the air force.The CAAC has moved to bring privateenterprise into the picture, allowingprivately owned pilot training schoolsto open. One of these is Beijing PanAmInternational Aviation Academy, whichbecame last December the first privatelyownedcommercial pilot training schoolin China given China Civil Aviation20 ORIENT AVIATION MAY 2006