Liu Xiaolin was one of the five women to be enrolled in China Civil Aviation Flight College in 2003 to become airline pilots.

Before then, the college, which has trained more than 90 per cent of China's airline pilots captains, first officers or second officers in the past 50 years, had never enrolled a woman for flying lessons.

If all goes well, Liu and the four other women will work for China Southern Airlines next year after they graduate.

Twelve other women were recruited by the college in 2004 but since then, the door has been closed to other women with the same dream.

"Before I am sure of the market demand, the college will temporarily stop recruiting female students for pilots," said Zheng Xiaoyong, head of the flying college, which celebrates its golden anniversary this year.

Zheng would not confirm that women pilots have difficulty being employed, but his decision to stop recruiting women implied that is the case at least, in his eyes.

It takes four years to train pilots at a cost of about 700,000 yuan (US$87,500) each. Often, a pilot is first hired by an airline, which then pays the college for the education. But in some cases, for both men and women, the college trains the students at its own expense and then seeks reimbursement from the airlines that hire them.

The school, therefore, loses money if a student is not employed by an airline. In the case of the 12 women recruited in 2004, Zheng said he has considered keeping all of them as trainers when they graduate in 2008. The instructors are currently all men.

But that situation still hints that the airlines are not employing women pilots even though the three domestic airline groups Air China, China Southern and China Eastern all maintain that gender is not an issue in pilot recruitment.

"As long as they are good at flying, we welcome both male and female pilots," said Li Jiang, a China Eastern spokesman.

"The most important issue is to guarantee flight safety, not gender," said Cai Zhizhou, a China Southern spokesman.

Air China says it plans to recruit 50 college graduates and 350 high school students next year, but the ad on its website says that applicants should be men.

Advertisements for other airlines say that as well.

The two main training centres for airline pilots are the China Civil Aviation Flight College in Southwest China's Sichuan Province and the Civil Aviation University of China in North China's Tianjin Municipality. In some cases, airlines hire ex-military pilots, who need training only in how to fly certain civilian aircraft.

In 2003, Air China recruited three women college students and sent them to Tianjin for training.

"Air China's pilot team is all men now because the three women are still in training and have not started working as pilots yet," said Wang Yongsheng, a company spokesman.

They will graduate next year, but the airline has not recruited any more women. China Eastern has two women pilots who had flown in the air force, and China Southern has one.

China lags behind the rest of the world in the recruiting of female pilots. The website of the International Society of Women Airline Pilots estimates there are about 4,000 women among the 80,000 airline pilots worldwide, which is 5 per cent. The United States has 6 per cent, and the United Kingdom has 2 per cent.

Of China Eastern's more than 2,000 pilots, only two are female, a ratio of less than 0.1 per cent.

Piloting is highly stressful both psychologically and physically. In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration requires all pilots to have two physical examinations every year.

Men certainly are stronger, and Liu Xiaolin, the female student in Sichuan, concedes that point. "The physical difference is especially apparent in the first semester," she said.

But Liu and the four other women all passed the psychological and physical tests, which are the same for men and women, before enrolling at the college.

"In senior middle school, we were all good at sports," Liu said. "I was good at long-distance running, and my classmates were good at some other sports.

"Our arm strength was clearly weaker. So we lifted dumbbells in the dorm whenever we were free, and finally we were able to do the same training as men."

After two years of learning flying theory, the five women students have moved into practice.

"Technically, we are as good as men," she said. "We five have all been making progress as well as the others."

The five women felt the glare of the media in their freshman year as media across the country reported on them as the first batch of domestically trained women pilots with college degrees.

"We've never felt different from men," Liu said. "None of us required special care in training or other classes."

Talking about the future, Liu looks longingly towards China Southern's most recent purchase from Airbus.

"I hope," she said, "we women can be assigned to fly the A380 (as first officer) one day."