As the demand for pilots soars, Chinese nationals are flocking to New Brunswick city to earn their wings

OLIVER MOORE

November 29, 2007

MONCTON -- The first clue comes before you even walk in - the sign advertising English tutoring taped beside the front door of the modern building.

Once inside the flight school, you might find a Chinese-language newspaper in the lobby waiting area. Red paper lanterns hang in the cafeteria and a glance at the trophy cabinet shows a recent prize for outstanding student went to Hui Goan Yi.

In a little more than a year, Chinese nationals have become the biggest group of trainees at Moncton Flight College. Sparked by the Chinese airline industry’s insatiable desire for pilots, these students are part of a trend that has an increasing number of Chinese training at flight schools around the world.

The Chinese students are expected to make up two-thirds of the student body here by next year. It’s an influx that has meant rapid growth, a tripling of the staff, the addition of a 120-bed dormitory and quick expansion of the fleet. There have also been seemingly minor but crucial changes.

One was food, CEO Mike Doiron said. The school’s chefs did their best when the Chinese students started arriving a few years ago, he explained, but it quickly became clear that "Chinese-Canadian" cuisine wasn’t going to cut it.

Hearing about the students’ unhappiness, a local woman offered to take over the kitchen, and she now supervises five people, each of whom hails from a different part of China. They source from Toronto the foodstuffs they can’t find locally, driving to Ontario regularly and packing a minivan full of spices and sauces.

The food is now as authentic as can be produced by a kitchen in Moncton, Lynn Long said proudly, though they occasionally put on less-traditional food as a special.

"Once in a while we have that. Chicken balls, egg rolls, fried rice," said Ms. Long, who was born in Vietnam but is ethnically Chinese. "They’ve never heard of that before. They say, ’What is this?’ I say, ’It’s chicken balls’ and they say, ’We’ve never seen that in China.’ "

The school does what it can to ease culture shock, but Mr. Doiron pointed out it’s not running an exchange program. The students are not here to learn about Canada or experience a different culture. They are students at Beihang University, an aeronautical school in the Chinese capital, and they are spending their fourth year here learning to fly.

All the students in a class visited last week were bound for China Southern Airlines, a Guangzhou-based carrier that has Asia’s largest fleet. Over the course of 47 weeks in Moncton they will do about 850 hours of classroom, flight and simulator training, all of it in English, with 200 hours of structured study on top of that. They work their way from the tiny Diamond DA20C1, a two-seat trainer that resembles a dragonfly, to the twin-engine King Air C90.

"The kids are here to become professional pilots and that’s all they’re doing," said Mr. Doiron, who described the training as near-military in its attention to detail. "They have almost no control over their schedules."

The rate offered the Chinese students is proprietary information, Mr. Doiron said. He added, though, that a person walking in off the street would have to pay $80,000 to get the same package, which includes instruction, accommodation and meals.

The students leave Moncton ready to start training on full-size airliners. It’s a gruelling schedule that leaves them little spare time. They don’t spend much of it in town, several said, preferring to stay close to the airport.

Mr. Doiron said the school has trained international students since the 1960s, but in the past few years has made a serious push into the Chinese market. They have since signed multiple contracts and expect that next year there will be 250 Chinese nationals among the 400 students.

"The market is exploding out there. They need pilots and don’t have the supply," Mr. Doiron said. "We’re now the largest flight-training operator in the country."

INSTRUCTORS WANTED

The airline industry is grappling with a looming crew shortage that insiders say will require half-a-million new pilots over the next two decades. It’s a widely reported number, but Mike Doiron is concerned about a more elemental problem: a dearth of flight instructors to train those new pilots.

Mr. Doiron, the CEO of Moncton Flight College, says becoming a flight instructor has historically been less lucrative than entering commercial aviation. It was one of the ways aviation schools tried to keep prices at a relatively affordable level.

"You really can’t make a great living at it, unless you’re a senior instructor," Mr. Doiron said in a recent interview.

But now, with the airline industry expected to double in size over the next 20 years, including a boom in Chinese startups and airports, it’s become a seller’s market for trainers.

Here in Canada there are 200 flight schools competing for trainers. Most of them are little "mom and pop" operations, Mr. Doiron says, but they’re all facing the same shortage.

It’s a problem he knows firsthand. His school, which he says is the biggest in Canada, has had to increase its staff quickly to 116 from 38 employees to handle the influx of Chinese students. He calls the persistent shortage of trainers his "long-range concern."

"Every flight school in this country is searching for instructors."