China's top legislator visits Sino-Egyptian cooperative training aircraft project

China's top legislator Wu Bangguo on Sunday afternoon visited a Chinese-Egyptian cooperative training aircraft project to highlight the Sino-Egyptian strategic and cooperative relations.

Wu, Chairman of the Standing Committee of China's National People's Congress (NPC), inspected the components workshop and the assembly workshop in the aircraft factory of the Arab Organization for Industrialization, which is located in Helawan in the south suburb of Cairo.

Wu, who arrived here earlier Sunday, was taken a photo with a new K-8E aircraft and epigraphed that Sino-Egyptian cooperation flies with full wing.

The top legislator, who arrived in Luxor, some 680 km south of Cairo, also discussed with Lieutenant General Hamdy Wahiba, president of the (AOI) the production of the K-8E aircraft in accordance with the contract signed between China and Egypt in the end of 1999 to produce 80 aircrafts, an aircraft localized production line as well as an aircraft research center and a comprehensive logistic safeguard system.

The first batch of 80 aircrafts were completed on Dec. 11, 2005 and the two sides signed the contract to produce another 40 aircrafts in November, 2004, with the production of six aircrafts already completed and 10 to be produced yearly within four years.

The Arab Organization for Industrialization (AOI) supervises nine military factories which are producing civilian goods as well as military products. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates ( UAE) gave back to Egypt their shares in AOI in 1993, valued at 1.8 billion U.S.dollars.

AOI now is entirely owned by the government of Egypt. AOI has about 19,000 employees out of which are 1,250 engineers. AOI fully owns 10 factories and shares in 2 joint ventures, beside the Arab Institute for Advanced Technology.

Egypt is the first leg of Wu's three-nation tour to Africa and Europe, which will also take him to Hungary and Poland.