He does not understand that when it comes to aviation, most of the world have to import everything, and by that 'everything', it literally mean everything relating to aviation. From people, to information, to materials, to education and training, to standards, to tools...everything. Even people is not native. You have to import other people to train yours, and those non-natives have to remain with you for duration until the next generation of your people entering aviation. As long as your country cannot produce a single airplane, and I do not mean assembly from instructions, you are completely reliant on foreign sources for that 'everything'.
Chinese civil aviation still has a long way to go. As it is, China do not have a true civil aviation environment. Chinese domestic airspace is still under military jurisdiction, whereas, I learned how to fly whilst in high school before entering the USAF. How many licensed
PRIVATE civilian pilots are there in China?
A boom in Chinese air travel is sending hundreds of novices to flight school in Arizona.
www.smithsonianmag.com
To meet rising demand, the country will support as many as 100 airlines in the next few decades, according to Chinese media. Yet Boeing recently estimated that within 20 years, China will have a shortfall of 77,400 commercial pilots. (The country’s regional airlines are recruiting foreign pilots: Shenzhen Airlines recently advertised for a captain’s position paying an annual salary of $212,000.) The country’s 12 civilian aviation academies are operating at full capacity, and can turn out only 1,200 to 1,400 certified commercial pilots per year. Chinese airlines spend the equivalent of $162 million annually to send 80 percent of the student pilot candidates abroad: about 2,000 to the United States, the others to Europe and Australia. The big advantage of learning abroad is English language immersion. Aviation, even in China, is a business conducted in English.
General aviation [GA] is all civilian flying except scheduled passenger airline service.
• An estimated 65% of general aviation flights are conducted for business and public services that need transportation more flexible than the airlines can offer.
• More than 90% of the roughly 220,000 civil aircraft registered in the United States are general aviation aircraft.
• More than 80% of the 609,000 pilots certificated in the U.S. fly GA aircraft.
That is over 600K private pilots just in the US alone. The C919 is a commendable achievement for China, but these guys here really do not understand the scale of what Chinese civil aviation has to overcome and believes that domestic aviation alone is enough to get rich on a single platform.
