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| Private helicopter on display at a recent housing fair. Industry insiders say buyers of private aircraft should have minimum assets of 100 million yuan. [Photo/China Daily] |
Rising number of wealthy, increasing business use
The demand for private aircraft is taking off to new heights in China 15 years after the country's first personal airplane hit the sky, said industry experts.
In 1997, Broad Group's CEO and Chairman Zhang Yue purchased a Cessna Citation jet and became China's first personal craft owner. By the first half of 2012, the number of the country's private business craft rose to 126, Jin Junhao, an official in charge of general aviation at the Civil Aviation Administration of China, told the China Aviation News.
The market started to boom in 2009 and has since forged ahead rapidly, according to Jason Liao, CEO and chairman of China Business Aviation Group, a major business craft dealer in the country.
Liao said there were fewer than 30 business craft across the nation back in 2007 but more than 80 were delivered to China between 2009 and 2011.
He also expects another 70 to 80 to join the private business fleet by the end of this year, adding that he thinks the figure will increase 25 percent annually from this year onward.
His optimism in the Chinese market is shared by leading manufacturers in the industry.
"We sold our first new Falcon to China in 2006 but the market has now grown to become our largest for new aircraft orders and our most promising," said John Rosanvallon, president and CEO of Dassault Falcon, a subsidiary of Dassault Aviation.
Dassault Falcon also announced in September that a regional customer service headquarters is scheduled to start operation in early 2013 in Beijing to better cater the needs of Chinese customers.
The Brazilian aerospace conglomerate Embraer predicts in a report on its website that 470 business airplanes will be delivered to China from 2010 to 2020, accounting for 6.8 percent of the global market and making the country the second-largest after the US.
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