With Chinese President Xi Jinping and French President Emmanuel Macron as witnesses, a memorandum of cooperation in running a university was signed by Xu Huibin, President of Beihang University, and Olivier Chansou, Director of Ecole Nationale de l'Aviation Civile (ENAC), at the Great Hall of the People on the afternoon of January 9th.

According to the memorandum, Beihang and ENAC will make full use of their advantages to jointly build a top international aviation university that adopts new mechanisms. With the support from the People’s Government of Zhejiang Province as well as Chinese and French enterprises, the university, an independent legal entity under Sino-French cooperation, will cultivate excellent professionals in aviation for China and the world.

Located in Paris at birth and moved to Toulouse in 1968, ENAC is a leading university in Europe in the field of aviation, providing the civil aviation industry of Europe with a great number of talents since its foundation in 1949. Its areas of expertise include air traffic management, civil aviation management, airport management, global navigation satellite system, pilot training, etc.

Beihang’s partnership with ENAC dates back to 2011. At present, the two universities has cooperated closely and deeply in research on air traffic management, satellite navigation and airworthiness, and their joint effort in talent cultivation has also borne fruit. Launched in 2014, their program to cultivate talents in airworthiness is financed by the China Scholarship Council.

In recent years, Beihang has put forward its goal to build a world-class university rooted in China and the “university-to-university, professor-to-professor, and student-to-student” (UPS) development strategy for internationalization. It is believed that the signing of this memorandum will bring more international high-level talents to the civil aviation industry.

Reported by Gao Yuan and Niu Miaozhuo

Photo by Kong Xiangming

Edited by Shi Yue and Li Mingzhu

Translated by Li Mingzhu