For more than six decades, Taiwanese who wanted to learn how to fly had two options—join the Republic of China (ROC) Air Force or attend a private flight school overseas. But that changed last September with the launch of Apex Flight Academy, which offers a ground course at its headquarters in Taipei and flight instruction at its base at Taitung Airport in southeastern Taiwan. “We’re not a flight club,” says Apex’s founder and chairman Wilson Kao (高健祐). “We want to be one of the largest pilot education centers in the region.”
That is a lofty goal, but Apex has achieved liftoff. The first group of students has completed ground and flight training, making them eligible to apply for private pilot licenses (PPL). But for many students—roughly half, Kao says—a PPL is just the initial step on their path toward earning a commercial pilot license (CPL) and pursuing a career with China Airlines, EVA Airways or another international passenger carrier. “The starting salary for a first officer—that guy who sits to the right of the pilot—is NT$140,000 [US$4,500] a month,” Kao notes.
Enrollment at Apex is currently 30 students, and the company’s founder predicts that this will rise to between 60 and 80 by the end of the year. Unlike most new businesses, Apex has yet to advertise. Taiwan has a small but tight-knit flight community with its own online forums, social media groups and websites. The launch of a local flight school was big news on these platforms and word spread quickly.
“There is a pool of people here who want to fly,” Kao says. “Just look at the number of registered ultralights—220 or more—around the island.” Recent years have seen a rise in the ownership of private jets as well, though these are piloted by professional crews rather than their owners. “That takes the fun out of it,” Apex’s chairman believes. “The real joy of flying is learning how to pilot your own aircraft.”
In movies, pilots are typically portrayed as a breed apart, starting out as starry-eyed children pointing at planes high in the sky before overcoming huge obstacles to earn the privilege of climbing into a cockpit. However, as is the case with Kao, life rarely imitates art.
Apex’s founder has been around pilots since childhood, and simply assumed he would follow the same career path. Born in Taiwan, he had family members in the ROC Air Force and at China Airlines. He moved to the United States at the age of 11, and following high school attended Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. However, nearsightedness kept him from becoming a commercial airline pilot, though he later had Lasik surgery to correct this condition.
Kao returned to Taiwan and found sales work at Sunrise Airlines, a general aviation services provider, where he became general manager. From 2003 to 2006, he served as president of the Taipei Association of General Aviation. Next, Kao went to mainland China and started Yasheng Air Ambulance Cable Company, becoming the first ROC citizen to launch an airline in the mainland. However, during his stint in mainland China, Taiwan remained on his mind. “I saw there was a niche,” recalls Kao, referring to the island’s lack of a pilot training facility, “and I thought maybe it was time to go back.”
Students attend a class at Apex’s ground school in Taipei. (Photo by Chin Hung-hao)
During Kao’s absence, the skies over Taiwan were clearing. For decades, a handful of domestic airlines had shuttled passengers between the island’s cities, but flight volume dropped precipitously after the 2007 launch of the Taiwan High Speed Rail, which runs approximately 345 kilometers along the island’s western coast. The country’s international airports were as busy as ever, but fewer and fewer aircraft were flying in and out of domestic airports. Flight paths had emptied, and there was unused capacity on the nation’s tarmacs.
Equally significant, there has been a relaxation in legal restrictions concerning Taiwan’s airspace since the lifting of martial law in 1987. “Originally, all of the airspace over Taiwan and all of the airports were under the jurisdiction of the ROC Air Force,” explains Billy Chang (張國政), the 72-year-old head of the nonprofit Aviation Education Foundation in Taipei. As a pilot who rose through the ranks of the ROC Air Force and later served as director-general of the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) under the Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC), Chang knows this history well.
He cites two previous high-profile attempts to launch civilian flight schools. The first, he notes, came in 1992 and was led by then director-general of the CAA Yuan Hsing-yuan (袁行遠). The second, in 2002, was spearheaded by Tsay Jaw-yang (蔡兆陽), a former transportation minister and then chairman of the China Aviation Development Foundation, a body overseen by the MOTC that owns a large stake in China Airlines.
Tsay actually got his school up and running. “My son passed the exam, and I was told, ‘Your son is going to be a pilot,’” recalls Chang. But the project came to an abrupt end amid bureaucratic wrangling after the disintegration of China Airlines Flight 611 on May 25, 2002 over the sea near Penghu, Taiwan’s worst air disaster.
The dream of a Taiwanese flight academy languished for another decade. Several private groups announced plans for schools only to see them fade away. Even Chang attempted to establish an academy, registering a flight school in 2012, but he abandoned the project due to a lack of investors.
Now Taiwan has Apex, and Kao is determined to see his academy succeed. He certainly has not skimped on hardware. Apex’s ground school is in an office tower in the pricey Neihu District of Taipei. The flight school in Taitung, meanwhile, sits adjacent to Taitung Airport, and nearby, out on the tarmac, is a freshly painted hangar emblazoned with the Apex logo. Inside are four turboprop Diamond Aircraft four-seaters—models DA40NG and DA42NG—the latest trainer aircraft imported from Austria.
Prior to launching the school, Kao did a back-of-the-envelope estimate of the potential number of students in Taiwan. First, he calculated the proportions of private pilots to the populations of each of the United States, Europe and Australia. Based on those ratios, he figures that the number of licensed pilots in Taiwan could reach 34,000. However, opting for a more conservative outlook, he lowered that to 10,000 potential students over a 10-year time frame.
Apex’s founder and chairman Wilson Kao believes that a growing number of people in Taiwan are interested in obtaining private or commercial pilot licenses. (Photo by Chin Hung-hao)
To survive, Apex needs to recruit only a fraction of that number, but the quality of instruction will be crucial. The school’s reputation will be determined by the employability of its graduates. “We don’t take just anyone who walks in and wants to pay,” Kao notes of potential students. “They’re vetted by our testers, and we select candidates with the potential to become commercial pilots. If we graduate students of a low quality, the airlines won’t come to us anymore.”
Although it holds a monopoly in Taiwan, Apex is in reality competing against overseas schools. In the United States alone, there are around 600 flight academies certified by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). For decades, Taiwanese students have been attending these schools, many of which have recruitment agents in Taiwan.
Apex’s ground instructor, Johnny Chou (周家弘), is among the many Taiwanese who have studied at one of the US academies. After graduating in 2009 from Chung Yuan Christian University in Zhongli City, Taoyuan County—now Zhongli District, Taoyuan City—with a bachelor of science degree in biomedical engineering, he contemplated earning a master’s in the United States. However, he doubted that the additional degree would raise his earning potential upon returning home. “I didn’t want to spend a lot of money studying in the US,” Chou says, “and then end up with a low-paying job in Taiwan.”
So instead he enrolled at the Sierra Academy of Aeronautics in Atwater, California, where he got his PPL, CPL and Instrument Rating—all certifications required for employment by airlines. The 11 months of instruction required to earn these qualifications cost him US$75,000, not including travel costs. Upon returning to Taiwan, Chou was hired by Apex, and sent back to the Sierra Academy to get Advanced Ground Instructor certification.
Although students can save on travel expenses, attending Apex is costlier than enrolling in the US academies, Chou says. “It’s more expensive because our company has the latest planes, the new generation from Diamond,” he notes. “Flight schools in the US use old planes.”
Chou says that the biggest challenge for many of his students is the need to improve their English-language skills. If someone earns a PPL and wants to fly point-to-point around the island, English-language proficiency is not necessary. But it certainly is for anyone who wants to fly international routes. Teaching materials at Apex are in English, and an often-used text is the FAA’s Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge. Considering the heightened level of interest in flying in Taiwan, “I predict that someone will come out with a Chinese version soon,” Chou says.
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Glenn Smith is a freelance writer based in Taipei.
Copyright © 2015 by Glenn Smith