Authors: James Fallows
So much is possible. China’s ACAE could become the new GE or Pratt & Whitney. COMAC could become the new Airbus or Boeing. Honeywell, Rockwell Collins, Siemens, and others could come to regret the factories and research centers they have built inside China. But the point of this long review is that such
an outcome is not fated, and perhaps not even likely. And whatever their Chinese competitors do, the American, Canadian, British, German, French, Japanese, Brazilian, and other players with established businesses will have only themselves to blame if they do not keep innovating as fast as they can.
When people within China say that the low-wage, low-tech industrial model may be hitting a limit, or that a China capable of high-end, high-tech innovation would be different in basic ways from today’s society, building modern airliners is the sort of challenge they are referring to. A different industrial organization, built upon a different research base, bolstered by different intellectual property laws, and run with a different management approach, might close all the gaps that keep China from the all-fronts aerospace achievement that is part of its announced plan. But a lot more than aviation would need to change to realize that version of China.
Through the summer of 2011 and into early 2012, the main trade battles between China and the European Union were not the familiar ones over subsidies or trade barriers. Instead they concerned the E.U.’s proposal to make all airlines flying into European destinations pay an emissions tax for each ton of carbon dioxide they produced.
Chinese representatives complained that the tax was “unfair.”
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The carbon calculations, and fees, would be based on the length of the entire flight, from point of departure to destination—so long hauls from Asia would pay much more than European carriers on their short regional flights. A Chinese airline company threatened to cancel a gigantic $3.8-billion order with Airbus in protest.
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“China’s actions show it is ready to use its economic muscle to pressure EU policies,” an Asian-based environmental news service observed after the postponement of the Airbus deal in 2011. U.S. companies also opposed the E.U. program, but naturally they expressed their disagreements by filing lawsuits.
The importance of this issue can only grow. How can China possibly entertain these ambitions, from opening new airports to doubling the volume of air traffic to building its own airliners,
in the face of certain environmental constraints on polluting activities in general and on aviation in particular?
In any discussions of environmental issues in China, it’s a toss-up as to which deserves more emphasis: how dire the situation is, or how hard Chinese authorities are trying to cope with it. The immediate threat posed by airline emissions in China is less obviously dire than, say, the particulate pollution that so often makes big-city air opaque, or the heavy-metal tainting of food and groundwater supplies that has contributed to China’s current cancer epidemic. But airplane emissions are significant, and will become more so, especially as aerospace grows faster than other parts of China’s economy.
A reminder of the scale and nature of the problem:
As of 2010, all human activity together put roughly 37 billion tons (37 gigatons) of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. Twenty years earlier, it was less than 25 billion tons. Twenty years later, it could well be 50 billion tons. Carbon dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas, but it is important because we produce so much of it, and because its effects are so long-lasting. Carbon dioxide persists in the atmosphere for many decades, even centuries—unlike methane, which has a more powerful greenhouse effect but can disperse within a single decade.
Before James Watt invented the modern condensing steam engine in the late 1700s—that is, before we had much incentive to burn coal and, later, oil in large quantities—the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was around 280 parts per million. By 1900, as Europe and North America were industrializing, it had reached about 300 ppm. By 2010, the carbon-dioxide concentration was at or above 390 ppm, which
was probably the highest level in many millions of years, and was rising by about two ppm a year. It is estimated that it will pass 400 ppm by 2015, and 420 by 2025.
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Of those 37 billion to 40 billion tons emitted in 2010, aviation in all forms accounted for about 2 percent in sheer quantity—and perhaps twice that in climate-change potential, because the pollutants are more damaging when injected into the atmosphere at high altitude. The world’s entire shipping fleet, which together with aviation ties the globalized economy together, contributes about the same total of carbon emissions.
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Electric-power generation is the largest source of carbon emissions, followed by transportation in all forms.
What drew the international airlines’ attention to the emissions problem was the likelihood that as world CO
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emissions keep going up, those from aviation will be going up even more, and might double by 2030.
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A study sponsored by an airline industry consortium found that between 1990 and 2003, aviation’s output of greenhouse-gas emissions in Europe had gone up by 80 percent, whereas transportation as a whole was up only 20 percent, and many other sectors (including power generation, agriculture, and manufacturing) had actually declined.
By 2010, when climate talks in Copenhagen were going nowhere, the aviation industry was long past the point of denial on emissions issues. Its European and U.S. leaders realized that for reasons of appearance, and because of impending legislation, and to forestall reaction from customers, they needed to act. They also had particular economic incentives. Fuel represents the largest single expense for airline companies. Each gallon they did not burn made their flights more profitable.
What could they do about it? In China, the answers are routing, and algae.
In the spring of 2011, my wife and I went with a young Chinese friend, River Lu, and a friend of hers to a concert by the Eagles in Beijing. The Eagles, as they say, are big in China and drew an enormous crowd of a wide range of ages to what in 2008 had been the Wukesong Olympic Basketball Arena and is now the MasterCard Center.
The concert lasted three hours, with the crowd on its feet from the halfway point onward, once Don Henley began singing “Hotel California.” When it was all over, it took another few hours to travel what would have been at most a ten-mile straight shot from the arena back to our apartment. My wife and I had no car (or driver) in China and usually traveled by subway, but our friend wanted to show off her new Chinese-made Audi and had given us a ride. Apart from the jam in the parking lot, which had only two narrow exits for several thousand cars, our routing across town was the problem. Because of Beijing’s numerous one-way streets and freeway-like “ring road” layout, we had to circle far around the city before we could head back in the right direction. In addition to taking extra time, of course we used far more gas in those hours of idling and indirect routing than if our friend had been able to drive right down Chang’An Road.
Those wasted hours were an analogue for why air travel in China has been exceptionally inefficient. The military’s control of the airspace around even the biggest commercial airports is the equivalent of having only a few narrow exits for a jammed parking lot. (That is, planes have to line up for chances to pass through the narrow military-authorized corridors.) And the military’s control of nearly all the airspace between Chinese destinations
means that flights within China, even by the favored national carriers, fly indirect routes that are the equivalent of going all around the city on a ring road.
These inefficiencies in air-traffic control are the main reason flights are more often delayed in China than in other major aviation countries; why their scheduled travel time, per mile flown, is much slower than in North America or Europe; and why they burn up to
twice as much fuel
per passenger mile as their counterparts in Europe or North America.
Let me say that again: For reasons of sheer pointless inefficiency in routing, airlines in China are now burning twice as much fuel and emitting twice as much carbon as they would “have” to if they could fly more directly, with fewer delays. Or, put in terms that more closely match the planned expansion of Chinese aviation, commercial air travel in China could double, with no increase in emissions, if the air-traffic system worked the way it does in the rest of the world. The situation is similar to the burden created by China’s “legacy” building stock—the architectural remnants of the Mao era and the early reform years that were so cheaply built and poorly insulated that they take twice as much energy to heat and cool as their Western counterparts. Replacing all those old buildings with greener modern structures will take decades, and billions of dollars. Relatively speaking, wasteful airline routing could be corrected almost overnight.
There is one more fuel penalty imposed by military control of the airspace. Modern airliners work more efficiently the higher they fly. With their high speed and great mass, they generate disproportionate drag if they fly through the relatively thick atmosphere below about 20,000 feet. More of their fuel goes simply to overcoming wind resistance. Everywhere else in the world, commercial jetliners spend their cruise time at 30,000
feet or above. In China, military restrictions sometimes keep jets at 10,000 or 15,000 feet for extended periods, where they become the equivalent of gas-guzzlers.
Ending this sheer waste will require the cooperation of the Chinese military, but it will also be speeded up through a new technology for navigation based on a particular application of GPS guidance.
For cars, GPS simply means that we no longer have to get lost—even if people who know a neighborhood can often improve on the suggestions from the voice in the device. For air travel, GPS means a number of related improvements. An obvious one is more direct routing—cutting the corners off the indirect, jagged course marked by the older aviation guidance system called VOR,
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with consequent savings in time, fuel, and pollution.
Another is reduction of the airport nuisance factor in big cities. The combination of very precise real-time GPS readings, which can locate even a fast-moving airliner within a space of a few feet, and sophisticated new computerized autopilots that can follow a very tightly defined path, now allows airplanes to fly exact slalom-style 3-D courses through the sky in a way that has never been conceivable before. With older VOR-based navigation, which prevailed around the world until the early 2000s, the “airways” that ran from one point to the next were eight to ten
miles
wide. That was the margin of error allowed planes on cross-country flights. Now the paths that airliners can fly—on departure, to avoid noise-sensitive areas of a big city, or on descent, to avoid hills and towers on the way to a remote or
difficult landing site—have a margin of error of a wingspan or two, or a few hundred feet rather than tens of thousands.
Why does this matter? Noise abatement for one, since the planes can more precisely follow paths that minimize neighborhood disruption. But the fuel savings are also significant. When the new path has been calculated to let the plane glide continuously down toward the runway, the final-approach stage of the flight requires only one-third as much fuel as the conventional method, which involves leveling off several times in a stair-step descent.
These benefits apply anywhere, and airports in Western Europe and Australia have taken the lead in installing them. Typically for America’s general standing in the infrastructure races, American airports lag behind. But the revolution in aircraft guidance has one more implication that matters far more in China than in most other countries: It promises to bring China’s most remote (and politically sensitive) areas within feasible air reach of the rest of the country.
The western half of China, from Xinjiang in the north to Tibet and Yunnan in the south, is very forbidding country for aviation. It includes some of the world’s remotest and most mountainous territory. This is dangerous to fly in for obvious reasons: peaks, violent storms, gusty winds. But there is also a less obvious reason. The navigational tools that have let aircraft find their way through bad weather and threatening terrain, and that have let controllers monitor their progress, have long depended on installations on the ground. Radar dishes to track airplanes themselves, radar-and-weather installations, “NavAids” like VOR stations—these all had to be built and maintained, and in a fairly dense network, to be of any use. It is no problem to have radar stations and navigational beacons dotted at intervals of a few dozen miles all across the East Coast
of the United States—or of China as well. It is a major challenge amid the mountains and high plateaus of Tibet—and better transportation to Tibet and other western regions where ethnic Tibetans live has been a strategic priority for the central government, so as to bind those areas more tightly with the rest of China. And since both the radar beams and the ground-based navigation signals travel in straight lines, they can’t reach into the valleys between mountain ranges. Air-traffic controllers looking for airplanes, and pilots looking for navigation signals, are both effectively blind when a mountain sits between a radar site and the airplane.
Much of western China has until recently been effectively beyond the range of reliable air travel. Navigation was so difficult that planes would often fly only in clear, calm weather—and the weather was very rarely clear and calm. The coming of GPS offered the first prospect of guidance to remote areas without building a network of radar stations and beacons along the way. The more recent advent of the high-precision systems collectively known as required navigation performance (RNP) is almost as important, in allowing safe (and fuel-efficient) approaches, in any weather, to the most isolated and forbidding airports in the world.