Representatives of Airbus China and HYLT shake hands after signing the agreement.

Airbus China will cooperate with a local company in Tianjin to develop flight trainers for the A320 aircraft, according to an agreement signed on Thursday.

The agreement states Airbus will provide access to its training software and data for the Tianjin HYLT Aviation Technology Corp (HYLT), which is the first time the aviation giant has opened the data to a Chinese company.

Airbus also plans to train staff for HYLT to help it “better use the data provided by Airbus in designing and developing flight trainers,” according to the company.

Founded in 2003, HYLT is a major developer and manufacturer of flight simulators and trainers in Tianjin.

The cooperation will facilitate developing flight trainers with intellectual property rights owned by China and be significant for training civil pilots in the country, noted Jiang Huaiyu, a ranking official with the General Administration of Civil Aviation of China.

China is short of civil flight trainers and depends on imported expensive ones. As the domestic civil aviation industry is booming, the country is in urgent need of reasonably priced flight trainers with convenient maintenance, he said.

Currently, over 510 airbuses are operating on the Chinese mainland and the figure will grow much larger in the coming years, according to Airbus.

Laurence Barron, president of Airbus China, eyed the agreement as “another significant step” in its cooperation with China’s aviation industry.

Airbus began its cooperation with China from 1985 and launched the A320 general assembly line in Tianjin’s Binhai New Area in 2006, the only Airbus plant outside Europe.

Local government also has high expectations for the union.

“The agreement signals that the Chinese enterprise has entered the international civil passenger flight trainers for the first time,” commented Zhao Haishan, director of the Administrative Committee of Binhai High-Tech Industrial Development Area.

By Guo Changdong