Cleared for take-off

General aviation is not new to China, but it is one of the few sectors that have not experienced strong growth over the past 30 years, hemmed in by stringent airspace rules that have given priority to military, and now increasingly commercial, flights.

For every takeoff, private aircraft owners have to go through a laborious process to obtain approval from the aviation authority. That has given rise to so-called black flying - taking to the air without approval - which has become more prevalent as rich Chinese splurge on aircraft.

Gao Yuanyang, director of the general aviation industry research center at the School of Economics and Management at Beihang University in Beijing, says that generally when a region's GDP per capita exceeds $4,000 (3,020 euros) it is ready for a general aviation industry.

"If its GDP per capita exceeds $10,000 a year it is ready for the development of business jets."

Gao says China is more than ready for general aviation because its GDP per capita exceeded $4,000 a year in 2010, and the GDP per capita in the well-developed Pearl River and Yangtze River deltas has surpassed $10,000 a year.

You need only compare the industry in China with that of the United States to see the potential, he says. In the US there were 230,000 aircraft last year, and the industry took in $150 billion and employed 1.2 million people. In China there were fewer than 1,200 registered aircraft, relatively few jobs and turnover estimated to be a fraction of that in the US.

"China's population is four times that of the US, and geographically China is as big, so the potential is obvious," Gao says.

Since China's reform and opening-up policy was adopted in late 1970s, nearly all the sectors that could turn into strong industries on par with the potential that the general aviation industry has shown have done so, he says; general aviation has not.

Christopher Jackson, a consultant in general aviation and director of project development for Genesis Investment of Shanghai, the sales representative in China for Cessna Aircraft, agrees, saying that general aviation contributes 1.5 percent of US GDP.

"General aviation in China accounts for around 0.0015 percent of GDP," says Jackson, who has been following general aviation in China for 12 years. "As the country tries to change its economy, drives its domestic consumption and creates jobs, especially high-tech jobs, the government sees general aviation as a major driving force to achieve that goal."

During the 1990s in China, the car was affordable to few, but it later shed its luxury status, and as sales grew, making it a mainstay of tens of millions of lives, it was transformed into an economic locomotive. A similar trajectory is forecast for the general aviation industry.

China's National Bureau of Statistics says the country produced about 700,000 motor vehicles in 1991. Ten years later 18.5 million rolled off the production line, nearly 17.8 million of them being sold to Chinese.

The market for general aviation aircraft, ranging from helicopters to single-engine planes to business jets, is obviously a lot smaller, but it is the minuscule 1,200 registered aircraft that has the heads of industry insiders spinning.

Among them are aircraft makers, particularly in North America and Europe, which have a much longer history in developing general aviation than does China.

One such is Piaggio Aero of Italy, which delivered its first aircraft to China last month, and which nurses ambitions of being a big player in the Chinese market.