200 airline pilots faked resumes

[lauhumku]

200 airline pilots faked resumes : Report

Updated: 2010-09-06 20:54

SHANGHAI: Chinese officials have found that 200 pilots falsified their flying histories, with more than half of them working for the parent company of an airline involved in China's worst plane crash in several years, a report said Monday.

The results of investigations in 2008-2009 showed that airlines desperate for staff were hiring pilots whose resumes had been faked, the newspaper China Business News cited sources with the civil aviation administration during a recent teleconference.

The report comes as the agency investigates safety measures nationwide following an August 24 crash that killed 42 people at a small airport in the northeast, in China's worst commercial airline disaster in nearly six years. Another 54 people were injured in the crash of the Brazilian-made Embraer 190 plane belonging to Henan Airlines during a nighttime landing at Yichun in Heilongjiang province.

A staffer who answered the phone at Shenzhen Airlines, which reportedly had 103 of the pilots with faked work histories on the payroll, said he had no idea about the report. Shenzhen Airlines is the parent company of Henan Airlines. China's aviation industry has expanded rapidly in recent years and regulators have struggled to keep up.

Airports have proliferated as have small regional airlines, reaching into remote cities like Yichun - 90 miles (150 kilometers) from the Russian border - that are eager to develop tourism and other industries to catch up with the country's economic boom.

 

[Taishi Ci]

Pilots who faked resumes back in the air


Pilots who faked resumes back in the air

BEIJING | Thu Sep 9, 2010 3:41pm EDT

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese pilots who had lied about their flying experience have been allowed to return to work after they took remedial action to make up their hours, according to the country's aviation watchdog. Chinese media reported this month that a probe in 2008 had found about 200 pilots had falsified elements of their resumes.

The Civil Aviation Administration of China said they had found 192 pilots whose "flying experience to different degrees did not accord with reality." Some had their licenses revoked, but others were given the chance to retrain and had been allowed to fly once more, the regulator said in a statement on its website (www.caac.gov.cn) late on Wednesday.

"Those pilots given compulsory retraining were, after a thorough inspection of their qualifications, allowed to resume their posts," it said, without naming the airlines involved or how many pilots had been allowed back to work. Following the incident, the regulator said it had tightened procedures to ensure the problem would not happen again, and that it would not tolerate such falsification.

The official Xinhua news agency said that with the rapid expansion of the aviation sector in China, "airlines turn a blind eye to fake records since they are happy to see more pilots certified by the administrative agency." China's aviation industry was jolted by an accident in the northeast of the country last month in which 42 people died when a Henan Airlines jet crashed short of the runway. Until that crash, there had been no other major accident as a result of stricter safety rules and relatively young fleets of mainly Western-made aircraft.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Chris Lewis and Sanjeev Miglani)