Air China, the official carrier of the Beijing Games, wants the cream of its flight attendants speaking fluently in English and giving customers a welcoming smile.

The airline has launched a new round of nationwide recruiting to find 300 attendants aged 19 and 25 to serve on popular flights next year.

More than 800 people, mostly students from flight attendant schools who will graduate next year, showed up on the first day of the preliminary stage in Beijing, while more than 5,000 people have applied for the dream job in other cities including Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chengdu. The final 300 will be decided in Beijing.

Air China said the standard height for female applicants should be between 164cm and 172 cm, while the standard for male applicants is 174cm to 180 cm. All applicants have to be unmarried. Apart from the normal criteria for flight attendants, applicants are tested on etiquette and communication.

Candidates with good spoken English will have an advantage over others.

Looks are not mentioned. But it is undoubtedly a major criteria.
Source: China Daily

An agreement signed by Air China could see it becoming one of the largest airline training providers in the world. It has signed a framework agreement to build a training center in Shunyi near Beijing airport that will eventually house 30 full-flight simulators as well as other pilot and cabin-crew training equipment.

Air China said the framework agreement ‘is a letter of intent and final details still need to be worked out’. It adds ‘there is no specific timetable’ for building the new training center.

Air China says its existing center is ‘not that big’ and there have been occasions when the carrier has had to send pilots to other simulator centers in China or overseas. The airline wants a much larger training center to support future growth.

Air China said, ‘We are doing it because we have a plan to expand our fleet, so we need to have more pilots and cabin crew.’

The airline has 187 aircraft in service and another 81 on order, including Airbus A320-family aircraft, A330s and Boeing 787-8s. Air China also has equity stakes in other airlines such as Cathay Pacific Airways, Shenzhen Airlines and Shandong Airlines.

According to statistics from the General Administration of Civil Aviation of China (CAAC), the industry regulator, about 11,000 pilots are employed to fly more than 770 aircraft operated by the major Chinese commercial airlines. This is a figure industry experts say is inadequate to cope with rocketing demand for passenger services.

The Civil Aviation Flight University of China, the nation’s major training school for commercial airline pilots based in Sichuan and Henan provinces, graduates a maximum of 600 pilots a year.

Based on the delivery of new aircraft, industry experts estimate that China has needed between 1,200 and 1,600 new pilots every year since 2000.

Our image is of a flight simulator. It may look like a Dalek but, inside, it is very close to the real thing. Pilots training in one can be put through emergencies that simply never happen in real life.
Source: Source: Flight

Europe’s aircraft manufacturer Airbus will shift the final assembly of modern commercial airliners to China to secure itself a larger share of the country’s rapidly growing and already worldwide second-largest air traffic market.

A joint venture agreement has been signed in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People with Germany’s Minister of Economy, Michael Glos in attendance.

The largest challenge for Airbus will be the training of local workers for the company’s first final assembly plant outside of Europe, which is currently being built in the port city of Tianjin, about 100 kilometers south-east of Beijing.

A project manager said with considerable truth, ‘Technically, we are starting out at ground zero’.

Some 500 Chinese employees will have to be selected, primarily mechanics, electricians, spray painters and logistics personnel. About 200 of them have already begun their training including intensive English-language lessons.

Lufthansa’s technical department will later provide aeronautics-specific training, which is to be conducted at Tianjin’s German-Chinese Vocational Training Centre.

The Chinese workers also will have to spend between 6 months and a whole year at the Airbus plants in Hamburg and Toulouse to gain practical experience alongside their European colleagues.

Production in Tianjin is planned to start a little more than one year from now, in August 2008, and 120 European employees will temporarily move to China to facilitate that launch.

The plant, adjacent to Tianjin’s airport, will be an exact replica of Hamburg’s modern final assembly facility, which specializes in short- and medium-range aircraft.

The first plane is not expected to roll off the assembly line before mid-2009, but once started, four aircraft of the model A320 should be finished each month, half the current output of the Hamburg plant.

Airbus parts will continue to be entirely produced in Hamburg, then shipped to China where only the final assembly will take place, which accounts for only 5% of the total value in terms of material and man hours.

Airbus continues to remain the preferred choice over Boeing in China.
Source: M and C

The figures are slightly frightening. According to the latest report from China Academy of Personnel Science, which should be able to make a fair stab at the figures, China will need at least 240,000 civil aviation personnel over the next 20 years.

The civil aviation industry in China is developing at a pace two times faster than the world average. Think about that for a moment and then understand why China faces greater shortages of pilots, crew members and maintenance experts.

Yu Renlu, an official with the General Administration of Civil Aviation of China (CAAC), said, ‘China’s civil aviation industry will need 10,000 pilots by 2010.’
Currently, 90% of China’s pilots are from the Sichuan-based Civil Aviation Flight University of China (CAFUC), which recruits about 1,000 students a year.

Chinese airlines spend a RMB1 million ($123,000 U.S. dollars) training pilots who study for four years at CAFUC before graduating with a pilot license and a bachelor’s degree.

Understandably, pilots are often required to sign long-term contracts with the Chinese airlines that have paid for their training. In recent years, an increasing numbers of lawsuits have been reported between domestic airlines and pilots who want to quit their jobs to work for foreign or privately-owned airlines that offer higher salaries.

Yu Renlu said that to meet the demand for new pilots, CAFUC should enroll more students and find alternative ways to pay for their training. He said in the future, pilots should pay for their own training, allowing them to choose which airline they want to work for after graduation. He did not say where the trainee pilots would find the necessary RMB1 million to pay for it.
Source: China Daily