Originally Posted by
Dick Smith
Here is a link to an article from the front page of
The Australian on 9 March 2018. There is a huge heading,
“China's pilot training school 'takeover' sparks air rage on the ground". From what I can make out, this hasn’t appeared on PPRuNe.
What is going on? In the old days, such an important article would be featured.
Are people losing interest in PPRuNe? What a pity.
Hey Dick,
That's an interesting and thought-provoking article, but I'd suspect it hasn't been posted yet because The Australian is behind a paywall (for the online version) and a whole bunch of people don't subscribe to physical papers anymore.
As for the article, Australians seem content to sell everything else to the Chinese so why would flying schools at regional airports matter? Some of these communities (e.g. Mareeba in the article) are evidently behind it because of the economic benefit these wealthy foreign students bring, some are not.
That said, I suspect that if ANY flight school, Chinese or otherwise, were to come along to a previously quiet regional airfield and increase aircraft movements by 1000% some locals will get upset. The fact that they are Chinese in this instance is probably just icing on the cake.
The bigger question here is why there is no business case for an Australian owned entity to run these schools with a contract in place for the foreign airline cadets? I suspect it comes down to the insurmountable amount of red tape involved in setting it all up before you'd even see $1 in revenue, and huge amounts of capital required.
It's a sad state of affairs!
