By IANS,
Beijing : A village in China’s Jiangsu province is unusual as all its residents live in plush villas with two cars and at least $250,000 in their bank accounts each and have free healthcare and education.
Huaxi village of China is now all set to reach new heights — it is training 100 pilots for its new air tourism project, China Daily cited the Yangtze Evening News as stating in a report.
Having already become a major tourist draw for being a unique success story, the village has splurged $13.4 million on buying two helicopters and plans to acquire a fleet of 20 aircraft over the next five years, besides its own airline!
The village planners here intend to cash in on the vast number of annual visitors by training the pilots to fly the tourists around.
Asked about the ambitious avitation plans, Wu Xie’en, the village head, said the village has around two million visitors each year and this prompted the tourism industry to eye the boom in Huaxi.
The flight course is centred on the village where the chopper will take about 15 minutes to fly two to four passengers around at a height no more than 300 metres. The budget for each flight is $4,460 per hour.
Spead over a radius of four kilometres and having a population of 36,000, this village is unsurprisingly hailed as one of China’s greatest success stories today.
In 1957, Huaxi was a sleepy village with just 576 residents and assets of about 1,800 yuan ($240).
In the last five decades, it has amassed revenues of 229.6 billion yuan ($44.89 billion).