Drones are displayed during the flight conference. /CGTN Photo
The Seventh Faku Flight Conference kicked off in Shenyang, capital of Northeast China's Liaoning Province on Saturday with the aim of increasing the awareness of China’s rising general aviation industry.
The three-day event invited 300 general aviation companies across China to showcase the latest aircraft.
"Policies are opening up for low-altitude flights, and the country’s civil aviation administration has been encouraging and supporting the development of general aviation," said Zhang Xiaochun, the captain of Dalian Eurasian Helicopter Limited Company.
In 2016, China tripled the airspace allotted for low-altitude flights from 1,000 meters to 3,000 meters above sea level. The market for general aviation in the country is now worth tens of billions of US dollars. Looking forward, the country is planning to have more than 5,000 general aviation aircraft in service —three times more than that of today’s number.
The General Aviation Industrial Base in Shenyang’s Faku county where the flight conference took place is expected to reach an annual production capacity of 1,000 aircraft a year in the future, which, in turn, will drive up the demand for pilots. It is estimated that China needs some 100,000 new pilots to keep up with its booming general aviation industry over the next decade.
“The demand for pilots is huge in China, but training time is short. The awareness of general aviation is still limited and we don’t have a big influx of people learning how to fly,” said Liu Guoyin, the deputy director for Shenyang’s General Aviation Industrial Base in Faku.
When it came to the drones, Liu added that unmanned aircraft have gradually become a part of general aviation considering the massive applications in agriculture and prospecting, and will be a supplement to the traditional industry.
