Air China swamps Australian flight school in urgent pilot hunt

Air China Ltd. has swamped an Australian flight school with a request for commercial pilots, a sudden demand that points to a looming rebound as the vast Chinese market resumes international travel.

Beijing-based Air China had stopped sending its trainees to the Australian Airline Pilot Academy campus in regional Victoria state after the pandemic halted overseas travel in early 2020. But talks resumed two months ago and the giant state-run carrier, almost out of nowhere, pushed the school to interview more than 100 candidates from China in just four days in April.

“It went from nothing to ‘when can we start?”’ said Chris Hine, executive chairman of the academy. “Logic tells me that we must only be at the start of it. Airlines are still rebuilding.”

The urgency of Air China’s personnel requirements underscores the pace of the post-pandemic passenger rebound — and the sheer number of flight crew needed to sustain it. The world will need more than 600,000 new pilots between 2022 and 2041, and the biggest requirement is in Asia, according to the latest forecast by planemaker Boeing Co.

The biggest potential crew demands for Chinese airlines may be on overseas services. In Northeast Asia, a region dominated by China, international flying is wallowing 42% below pre-Covid levels, according to OAG. The region’s domestic air-travel market is already larger than it was before the pandemic, the data shows.

Air China, which has a fleet of 757 aircraft, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

China’s largest low-cost carrier, Spring Airlines Co., which is adding more than 10 aircraft every year to build on its almost 120-strong Airbus SE fleet, needs many more cadet pilots to keep up with the pace of expansion, according to Vice President Zhang Wu’an. The number of new pilots needed annually will soon exceed the pre-Covid rate of around 200, he said, adding that while pilots train mainly in China, some gain qualifications in the US or Australia.

Recent bumper aircraft orders suggest the shortfall of pilots needed to fly the world’s commercial fleet in coming decades may only become more acute. European low-cost airline Ryanair Holdings Plc this month agreed to buy as many as 300 Boeing 737 Max jets with a list value of $40 billion. Air India Ltd. in February announced a 470-plane order with Airbus SE and Boeing in what stands to be the largest purchase in commercial aviation history.

Boeing Optimism

With demand soaring, Boeing executives are optimistic that they’ll soon deliver the first 737 Max jets to China since 2019. The nation’s air regulator was the first to ground Boeing’s cash-cow aircraft after two crashes in 2018 and 2019, and among the last to clear it to fly again.

China’s Max operators have all resumed flying the Boeing narrowbody jet since January. Some 138 ready-to-go Max jets earmarked for China are sitting in various Boeing storage lots in the western US. Handing over those aircraft to their owners would help generate billions of dollars that the planemaker badly needs to pay down debt and invest in its operations.

Air travel in China “has come back as robustly as anyone might have imagined,” Boeing Chief Executive Officer Dave Calhoun said on an April 26 earnings call. “Our customers, in my view, are going to need more airplanes in the relatively near-to-medium term.”

The Australian Airline Pilot Academy, or AAPA, serves partly as a crew pipeline for its owner, Australian domestic carrier Rex. But Hine, who’s a former chief pilot for Rex, said training overseas personnel is set to become a larger part of the business. The academy is in talks to train pilots for at least two other carriers in China, and its annual training capacity could quadruple to 400 aviators in five years, he said.

Officials from China’s civil aviation regulator are due to inspect AAPA’s main campus in Wagga Wagga, about a five-hour drive southwest from Sydney, in August. That could pave the way for Chinese pilot-training certification that extends beyond the AAPA facility in Ballarat, Victoria, Hine said.

For the interview marathon last month, Air China lined up more than 100 candidates, some in the airline’s offices in the Chinese capital and others in homes across the country. A tiny AAPA team 9,000 kilometers (5,600 miles) away plowed through back-to-back video calls and the Chinese carrier received a report on the fifth day. 

The first of about 70 Air China cadets are due to start training in Australia in June, Hine said. “China really likes what we do and the effort we put in.”