Pilot shortage throttling Chinese airlines too
Beijing: A pilot shortage is throttling the dramatic and safe ascent of China’s aviation industry, leaving hundreds of new Boeing and Airbus jetliners on order without pilots to fly them.
China will need an average of 2,500 pilots each year for the next two decades to fill cockpits, but it can’t meet the demand.
So for the first time, foreign pilots are taking command of some Chinese airliners. Citing the pilot shortage as one factor, Aviation Minister Yang Yuanyuan recently declared that the industry is growing “too fast.”
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China isn’t the only country with a pilot shortage. Airlines across East Asia — and around the world — are grounding flights and offering special pay packages to poach aviators from as far away as Brazil, Russia and Indonesia.
Chinese aviation regulators say the nation will need an additional 9,000 or more pilots by 2010, as national airlines add jetliners at the rate of up to 150 a year.
“But speaking truthfully, we only have the capacity to train about 7,000, leaving us short 2,000 pilots,” said Gao Hongfeng, the deputy head of the General Administration of Civil Aviation of China.
China’s Big Three airlines — Air China, China Eastern and China Southern — are working hard to deal with the pilot shortage.
Nearly 20 startup airlines wait for approval to operate, and a green light may not come soon. One reason: The startups don’t have pilots.
China Southern sends some pilots abroad for training, namely to a flight-training school it operates near Perth in western Australia.
In response to pilot shortages, Alteon Training, the commercial flight-training arm of Boeing, is offering a condensed jetliner-flight course that can train pilots in half the time, as short as 12 to 18 months, without students ever flying small aircraft, such as Cessnas, first. Students spend more time in simulators than in cockpits. The company is moving a simulator-equipped flight center from Kunming in southern China to Shanghai.
13/12/07 Tim Johnson/McClatchy Newspapers/Seattle Times, United States