Five-year EU-China Aviation Partnership Project launched

The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and partners are set to manage a €10 million ($11 million) aviation cooperation project between the European Union and China which will link technical cooperation with policy dialogue between the two respective aviation authorities. The five-year EU-China Aviation Partnership Project (APP) will be jointly implemented by EASA and the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) and funding will come from the Partnership Instrument of the European Union and supported by the CAAC. This latest initiative builds further on cooperation initiatives which began back in 1999.
Areas of mutual interest that the APP will focus on will include aviation safety and security; general aviation; air traffic management/air navigation services; airports; airworthiness; environmental protection; economic policy and regulation, and legislation and law enforcement.
Specific interest in these identified areas will include regulatory cooperation, safety promotion exercises, workshops, training and technical exchanges. Progress of the work plan implementation will come under review in September 2016 to either add to or update existing activities.
The EASA executive director, Patrick Ky, is quoted as saying at the launch of the initiative in Beijing: “We are building with CAAC the foundation for a strong EU-China Aviation Partnership. It will increase cooperation and mutual understanding in key areas such as safety and environmental protection; it will also allow for better exchange of best practices and standards between industry players.”
According to Feng Zhenglin, the CAAC administrator, the project marked the beginning of “a new era of broader and deeper cooperation in civil aviation” that would “promote the development of all aspects of the EU-China civil aviation relationship on the basis of mutual benefit,” while Dietmar Schweisgut, EU Ambassador to China, indicated that it made “perfect sense for two of the world’s largest aviation markets to work closely together.”