Age of private jets dawns on China

Zhang Yue, president of privately owned Broad Air Conditioning in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, is the uncontested king of private jets in China. His company confirms he has six of them, although people who work in the tiny world of corporate aviation in the mainland say he mostly uses them one at a time.

China, despite its annual 10 per cent growth rates, has fewer than 50 private or corporate jets; Brazil, an industrial pygmy compared with the mainland, has more than 700.

China's neighbours are not that far ahead of it. In all of Asia, there are 3,000 private or corporate jets registered, about the same number as in Los Angeles, industry data shows.

The stranglehold of the military on air traffic control, inadequate airport facilities, and a shortage of places for pilot training programmes are holding back the development of private aviation in China - as do high import tariffs on small jets and the abuse that the popular media heap on people who own planes.

The industry believes some 300 executive jets - from the smallest four to 10-seaters to the largest 30-seater models - will come to roost in China in the next 10 years, replicating in the mainland the liberalisation of aviation in Russia, which had had a similar legacy of military control of the skies.

Only about a dozen corporate jets are in active service in the mainland, said Yuan Bingbing, marketing director of Deer Jet, a Hainan Airlines subsidiary that accounts for 65 per cent to 70 per cent of China's corporate jet charter business. Seven of them are owned or managed by Deer Jet and two are owned by Air China.