Taiwan is likely to have its first civilian pilot training school as early as January next year, the country’s former top civil aviation official said on Saturday.
However, Billy Chang (張國政), who retired as head of the Civil Aeronautics Administration in 2008, said there have been several obstacles to getting the program off the ground.
“I plan to set up the school in Taitung, but it is very difficult to acquire land as the regulations are complex,” he said.
There has been much talk about establishing a flight school over the last three decades, but the idea has never come to fruition, he told an event organized by Privilege Aero LLC, a US pilot training school, to recruit students in Taipei.
As a result, local airline companies have to send their pilots abroad to receive training, he said.
“Taiwan should be capable of training its own pilots and airplane maintenance specialists,” said Chang, who is chairman of the Taipei-based Aviation Education Foundation.
He said he had already received funds from a German friend, but requires further financial backing from local investors because Taiwanese law sets strict limits on foreign investment.
Chang estimated that the school would cost about NT$3 billion (US$95 million) to NT$4 billion to operate for the first five years.
He also revealed a plan to recruit 60 professional instructors.
To get more experience, Chang recently visited four flight schools in the US, including Privilege Aero, which was established in 2003 by James Young, the first Taiwanese founder of a pilot training school in the US.
Young said his school now has more than 100 students, 14 of whom are Taiwanese. Chang lauded Young for inventing a ground-based flight simulator, the only one of its kind in the world licensed by the US Federal Aviation Administration.
Young said that he created it after he had to perform certain “dangerous” moves in a real plane when he was receiving his own training at pilot schools in the US.
“Using this simulator, a student can take a pause or rewind what he or she just did and listen to the instructor explain how it is supposed to be done,” he said.
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