It makes sense that as China’s
airline industry expands it will need more pilots. Carriers elsewhere may have
to increase what they pay in order to compete.
— Patrick Whyte
Chinese airlines need to hire almost
100 pilots a week for the next 20 years to meet skyrocketing travel demand.
Facing a shortage of candidates at home, carriers are dangling lucrative pay
packages at foreigners with cockpit experience.
Giacomo Palombo,
a former United Airlines pilot, said he’s
being bombarded every week with offers to fly Airbus A320s in China. Regional
carrier Qingdao
Airlines promises as much as $318,000 a year. Sichuan Airlines, which flies
to Canada and Australia, is pitching $302,000. Both airlines say they’ll also
cover his income tax bill in China.
“When the time to go back to flying
comes, I’ll definitely have the Chinese airlines on my radar,” said Palombo, 32, now an Atlanta-based consultant for McKinsey
& Co. who said he was speaking in his personal capacity and not his
employer’s. “The financials are attractive.”
Air traffic over China is set to
almost quadruple in the next two decades, making it the world’s busiest market,
according to Airbus Group SE. Startup carriers barely known abroad are
paying about 50 percent more than what some senior captains earn at Delta Air Lines, and they’re giving recruiters
from the U.S. to New Zealand free rein to fill their captains’ chairs.
With some offers reaching $26,000 a
month in net pay, pilots from emerging markets including Brazil and Russia can
quadruple their salaries in China, said Dave Ross, Las Vegas-based president of
Wasinc International. Wasinc
is recruiting for more than a dozen mainland carriers, including Chengdu
Airlines, Qingdao Airlines and Ruili Airlines.
‘Almost
Unlimited’
“When we ask an airline, ‘How many
pilots do you need?,’ they say, ‘Oh, we can take as
many as you bring,”’ Ross said. “It’s almost unlimited.”
Spokesmen for Qingdao and Sichuan
declined to comment. A Chengdu Airlines spokesman didn’t reply to faxed questions sent at his request.
Recruits preferring to live outside
China earn a bit less but are offered free flights home to visit family
members. Also on the negotiating table: signing bonuses, overtime pay and
contract-completion payouts. Earlier this year, Ross saw the monthly paycheck
of a pilot he placed at Beijing
Capital Airlines: $80,000.
“I looked at that and thought, ‘Man,
I’m in the wrong line of business,’” Ross said from Vienna, where he was
interviewing candidates for Chengdu Airlines. “They can live like a king.”
By comparison, the average annual
salary for senior pilots at major U.S. airlines such as Delta is $209,000,
according to KitDarby.com Aviation Consulting. Some U.S. regional airlines pay
$25,000 or less, according to the Air Line Pilots Association, representing
more than 52,000 pilots in the U.S. and Canada.
Fleet
Triples
Aviation is booming
in China, where the number of airlines has increased 28 percent to 55 in the
past five years. The fleet has more than tripled in a decade to 2,650,
according to the Civil Aviation Industry Statistics Report.
The growing ranks of low-cost
airlines favor single-aisle jets such as the A320, which can seat about 180
people. With passenger numbers in China increasing 11 percent last year,
carriers are scheduling more flights to handle demand. And that requires more
captains.
Offering a fat paycheck is the only
option for the newest carriers because they have minimal brand recognition and
a limited performance record, said Liz Loveridge,
who’s responsible for China recruitment at Rishworth
Aviation in Auckland. Chinese airlines are paying as much as five times more
than some Asia rivals for new hires, she said.
“They can’t attract people through
any other means,” Loveridge said. “They think money’s
the only answer.’’
Bureaucratic
Headache
The lucrative packages go some way
toward compensating recruits for one of their biggest headaches — government
bureaucracy. It might take two years for a pilot to start work in China after
applying for a job, she said.
“It’s the documentation, the work
permits, the immigration, the medicals,” she said. “They say they want pilots,
but there aren’t the resources.’’
About 30,000 pilots fly for Air
China, China Eastern Airlines and dozens of competitors, while about 2,200 foreign
pilots have transport licenses, according to the government’s Annual Report of
Chinese Pilot Development. South Korea, the U.S. and Mexico contribute the most
expatriates, and there’s also a lone Zimbabwean aviator.
Foreigners willing to captain a Boeing
737 for Urumqi Airlines can earn $21,333 a month, according to recruiter VOR
Holdings. They would be based in Urumqi, a western outpost bracketed by
Mongolia and Kazakhstan.
VOR also advertises similar roles at
Xiamen Airlines, with pay potentially topping $332,000.
Uncomfortable
China
“There aren’t a lot of expat pilots
who really want to go to China,” said Richard Laig,
Manila-based partner for the Asia-Pacific region at consultancy Mango Aviation
Partners Ltd. “There are places that are more comfortable.”
The imported aviators may do more
than just chip away at a pilot shortage — they can bring decades of experience
to the flight deck. The Asia-Pacific region’s accident rate — not just crashes
but incidents such as landing gear malfunctions — has increased since 2011,
according to the International Air Transport Association.
That safety record also is worse
than the global one. In Asia-Pacific, there were 3.2 accidents per million
flights last year, compared with a worldwide rate of 1.8 per million. The
Bloomberg Asia Pacific Airlines Index has declined about 10 percent this year.
“Some of the airlines see some value
in having a Western accent in the cockpit,” Loveridge
said. “They’ve got experience.”
That’s likely to become an even more
expensive commodity in China’s skies. Airlines and leasing companies announced
orders last year for 780 planes valued at about $102 billion. Chinese airlines
will need 6,330 new planes — worth $950 billion — in the next two decades,
according to Boeing Co.
That influx of aircraft means
carriers like Chengdu can’t be fussy about where they hire. Airline officials
gave Ross, the recruiter at Wasinc, the OK to hire in
bulk wherever he could.
“They told me: ‘Any place you can
find 15 to 20 pilots that want to interview, we’ll go there,”’ Ross said.
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