• The Primus 150, China's first indigenous business aircraft.
    The Primus 150, China's first indigenous business aircraft.
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China’s adoption of general aviation received another boost on October 4, with the launch of a A$2.3 billion industrial base project in the nation’s central Hubei province.

The Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), the nation’s largest single aerospace conglomerate, is building the 30 square kilometre facility outside Jingmen City to house aircraft manufacturing, research and training for the general aviation market.

Scheduled for completion in 2019, it is the first of what AVIC believes may eventually be a network of 50 such communities covering 90 percent of the nation’s population.

China is a relative newcomer to general aviation, not surprising in a nation where until recently the military controlled more than 90 percent of airspace.

Modern general aviation began in 1951, with government contracted Curtis C-46 Commando aircraft spraying pesticide.  A government sponsored flying school that opened in 1956 is still operating today, with a fleet of more than 100 Cessna 172s and Piper Seminoles.

But the last decade has seen a strong focus on general aviation, believed to have been spurred partly by the lack of aviation resources available to serve in the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which killed nearly 70,000 people. China’s 12th Five Year Plan, adopted in 2011, named general aviation as a strategic industry to be nurtured.

From a total of less than 50,000 general aviation hours flown in 1991, China has grown to fly 591,000 in 2013, with 1519 aircraft operated by 189 companies, according to the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC). Nearly a quarter of that number are trainer aircraft, as China ramps up to feed an increasingly mobile population’s need for airlines (CAAC figures suggest 70% of the flying hours total were devoted to training). A quarter are helicopters, mostly serving natural resource contracts in the country’s north east. And about 200 are business jets.

Since then the nation has begun to liberalise its airspace, formerly tightly controlled by the military, and build the regulatory regimes and training infrastructure needed to make general aviation an enabler for industry and the economy. China has also invested in or bought outright some of the world’s general aviation technologies such as Continental Engines and aircraft manufacturers Cirrus, Mooney and Epic (reborn as the Primus 150, China’s first indigenous business aircraft) and worked with others such as Embraer, Diamond and Cessna to establish Chinese assembly lines.

The nation is expected to be both a large market and potential competition for other aircraft and equipment manufacturers around the world.

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