China's Aviation.. Facts & Figures

              Let’s be honest here. With no doubt, China has the world’s fastest growing economy and that simply means; China is competing!

When we talk about China, we have to keep in our minds that China has gained a reasonable experience in making military aircraft for the 4 last decades. Commercially, in 1990, Airbus opened its first office in Beijing, China with less than 30 employees. In Sep 28^th 2008, the first Airbus final assembly line to operate outside Europe was officially opened in Tianjin, China. Nowadays, China is producing over half of Airbus in-service worldwide fleet’s parts and has a 34% market share of the whole Airbus market!! Add to that, Chinese government officially launched China Commercial Aircraft, the plan in which enables China to manufacture large passenger airplanes designed and built in China and expected to be rolling off a huge assembly line by 2020 (8 yrs from now)! All of that and more in terms of aircraft manufacturing and corporate aviation seems a kind of well-deserved topic to talk about in here. However, I will address in the following some facts and figures about China’s airlines industry, its potential impact on the US, and how it’s going to affect job opportunities of both; flight and management positions.

              Two decades ago, China was a “developing” country with respect to airline environment and its related industries. In late 2010, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) announced that Jan-2011 is the deadline for any new airline that wants to operate within the Chinese skies with foreign manufactured aircraft. After that, all “newly recognized” airlines should have all its fleet built from local factories. This means two things; first, how ready are the Chinese manufacturers to supply new airlines, either regional or legacy, with varieties of aircraft needs. Second and most important, how fast is the airline industry growing in this country. According to CAAC, the airline industry is expected to expand to 4,000 aircraft by 2025. The significance here is not by the number of aircraft. It is by the big difference between this expected fleet and how it was if we know that China’s fleet was only 500 aircraft in 2000!!

            China’s airline industry is rapidly growing and expanding. This is proven by the fact of approving airline operations for brand new carrier every year. While in the US, an airline “merge” is recorded every 4 to 5 years period of time and more flights are being operated by contracting regionals. Which assures that the US industry is shrinking!! Of course, China’s population is a major determinant in this unbalanced situation. But what we are observing here is that China is becoming the next qualified aviation competitor to the existing US and European players. In fact, I’m not quite sure how China’s airline industry is going to impact the US’s but I can summarize such an impact by saying that as long as the Chinese industry is flourishing, it’s going to schedule more flights to strategic destinations and airports. Also, competitiveness fundamentals tell us that the bigger you expand, the larger segment of customers you could please, the bigger the market you capture, gain trust and eventually make profits. In my point of view, to defeat the upcoming Chinese magnificence, the whole US industry with all its parties, including the regulatory bodies, should catch the opportunity to win the strategic alliances with the Chinese before Europe and the rest of the world get it with them. Only by doing this, the US could limit the Chinese potential success and have it comes complementary along with very strong aviation ties established only to favor the American aviation industry and its future needs.

            In terms of jobs, we are already experiencing lots of international carriers being interested in American aviators either pilots for well-established carriers or managers and professionals to assist fresh industries. As a support for Ms. Wall’s example of Cathay Pacific Airlines, a Hong Kong based air carrier, the company is hiring hundreds of aviators to occupy very important vacancies for the company just in the markets of US and Canada. The American aviation market is one of the biggest markets and China is well considering pleasing this particular segment of customers. Like I said above, a very smart way to win the expanding Chinese airline industry by our side is by signing several agreements with China in order to guarantee the shared benefits and good results of the Chinese existence in the global aviation arena.