Paul Lewis/BEIJING
Airbus Industrie is expanding significantly its customer-support operation in China to meet a twofold increase in the number of passenger aircraft in service with mainland carriers over the next two years.
Deliveries of recently ordered A320/A321s and A340-300s will double the Airbus fleet in China to more than 100 by 2000. Over the same period, the number of Chinese airlines operating the Airbus aircraft will expand to ten.
The number of Airbus aircraft in China will grow to about 50 by the end of 1997. "There is no reason why our accumulative market share in China can't reach 50%," says Airbus Industrie China president Rolf Rue. Including McDonnell Douglas aircraft, Boeing now has 80% of the Chinese in-service Western-built jet-powered fleet.
Deliveries of new Airbus aircraft for this year total 19, with 23 more aircraft scheduled to follow in 1998. China accounts for about one in ten of all new aircraft assembled in Toulouse and Hamburg, claims the European consortium.
New operators include China Southwest Airlines, which is to take the first of three A340s in 1998. China Northwest Airlines has just received the first of ten A320s on order, while China Eastern Airlines' Jiangsu and Jiangxi Aviation branches in Nanjing and Nanchang will each receive five A320s.
China Eastern is also leasing ten more A320s from General Electric Capital Aviation Services, while CNAC Zhejiang Airlines is operating two A320s leased from the same company and has four more on order.
Airbus' new joint-venture customer-service centre opened its classrooms to the first batch of A320 pilot trainees from China Northwest on 6 November. It now has contracts in place with all of the new mainland operators, as well as Dragonair and Air Macau.
The $68 million training centre is equipped with a single Thomson Training & Simulation (TTS) A320 full-flight simulator and will commission a second A340 system in February 1998. Airbus is also helping China Eastern to install a TTS A310/A300-600R simulator in Shanghai by the end of 1997. China Southern is planning to acquire its own A320 simulator from CAE in 1999.
An adjoining $12 million support centre is expected to be fully stocked by the end of the year with 15,000 Airbus spare parts and a further 3,500 vendor spare parts.
Source: Flight International
