Sitting in front of a desk, Lucas Tu (杜冠勳), a cadet of China Airlines (華航) in a flight training school in Adelaide, Australia, is sifting through piles of books and navigation maps on a normal Thursday evening, when most people are relaxing after work.
While studying, he looks up at a photocopy of a dashboard and an instrument panel that's pasted on the wall, and goes through the flying procedure in his brain as if he were on the aircraft. Tu has been leading this kind of tense life for 12 hours a day, for nearly six months. This might be what his life will be like until the day he retires.
"The training courses here are tough, but I was all prepared before I came," Tu said. "I know the life of a pilot is not as glamourous as some people may imagine."
Like Tu, another 57 cadets of China Airlines -- Taiwan's largest carrier -- choose to live a stressful life in order to accomplish their dreams of flying. They also realize they will be shouldering responsibility for flight safety in the future.
China Airlines started to recruit and train pilots in 1989, as pilot resources from the air force -- a main source for the airlines at the time -- were decreasing. The first batch of company-trained pilots graduated from a flight training center at the University of North Dakota in the US in 1991. Now, those graduates are performing their duties and taking on key positions within China Airlines.
"It takes 10 years and a total of NT$10 million (US$313,000) to nurture a full-blown pilot," said Roger Han (韓梁中), director of China Airlines' finance division. "But this investment is a must for us."
In 1995, company-trained pilots made up only a single-digit percent of China Airlines' pilot crew, while retirees of the ROC Air Force accounted for 80 percent. After years of personnel restructuring, company-trained pilots now make up one-third of China Airlines' 1,000-strong pilot crew.
"We've found that the introduction of more company-trained pilots has injected a new energy into our flight operations and contributed to improving flight safety," said Thomas Chang (張達明), assistant manager of China Airlines' crew resource management (CRM) training section.
Often, pilots who have retired from the air force make decisions based on many years of flying experience, Chang said. company-trained pilots are taught to strictly follow "SOP" -- standard operating procedure -- which was introduced by consultants from Lufthansa Technik AG, a subsidiary of Lufthansa German Airlines, in order to overhaul China Airlines' flight security measures in 1997 and 1999, Chang added.
The training program in 2000 was shifted to a well-known civil pilot training school in Adelaide, Australia, called British Aerospace (BAE) Systems, now named Flight Training Adelaide (FTA) after being purchased by Young Brothers Aviation last month. FTA is also the institution where major airlines such as Australia's Qantas Airways Ltd and the Dubai-based Emirates Airlines enroll their cadets.
In FTA, China Airlines cadets need to complete a 48-week training course, which contains 600 hours of groundwork education, including meteorology, aerodynamics, aviation law, navigation, and others, and requires 300 flight hours. China Airlines pumped in NT$6 million for each cadet for the training program, and therefore sets high standards for them, Chang said. Students who fail to pass one of the required modules are sent home immediately, Chang said.
RSS