200 unqualified airline pilots detected in China (Roundup)

Sep 7, 2010, 11:36 GMT

Beijing - About 200 airline pilots in China have been found to have faked their experience to get hired, media reports said Tuesday.

Pilots reportedly exaggerated the number of hours they had flown and falsified their credentials.

One Chinese aviation expert blamed the booming economy for the problem, a report in the China Daily newspaper said.

'The rapid expansion of China's civil aviation requires more commercial pilots, and the gap was usually filled up by those pilots who fly military aircraft but transferred to commercial flights,' said Liu Weimin of the Civil Aviation Management Institute of China.

'These pilots were very likely to falsify their flying history in the military since it is hard to track and verify,' he said. 'By doing this, they can get promoted more quickly in flying commercial airplanes.'

The news came in the wake of an accident involving a Henan Airlines flight on August 24 in Yichun in north-east China. Forty-two people died when the plane crashed while attempting to land.

The authorities are now checking the qualifications of all pilots, maintenance crews and other personnel.

The revelation was based on investigations from 2008 to 2009 that have just been made public.

Half the pilots with faked experience worked for Shenzhen Airlines, the parent company of Henan Airlines, the official Xinhua news agency reported.