China Airborne (6 page)

I am a lifelong aviation enthusiast, and for about fifteen years have been an active small-plane pilot. I had flown across the United States several times before arriving in China in 2006, and I imagined, or hoped, that I might be able to explore parts of the country in a small plane. Soon enough, I learned better. A few weeks after arriving in China, I had an unexpected interview with a senior official from the foreign ministry. I innocently explained my hope to see parts of China’s western frontier from the air. He managed to keep a straight face while my comments were being translated. “That is interesting,” he said in reply.

Ultimately I did manage to fly in a small plane more than once in and around mainland China, apart from the many dozens of trips I made on Chinese airlines. One year after my memorable trip from Changsha to Zhuhai with Peter Claeys in a Cirrus, I was copilot on another Cirrus flight with him. We started at a small airport outside Tokyo, down through Okinawa for a refueling stop on the eve of a typhoon, and after the storm passed to Taipei. From there Claeys took it on to Macau with an Italian pilot friend, Michele Travierso. Even though I had to give up—or, more optimistically, “postpone”—my own ambitions to fly throughout China, I sought out and met a large cast of Chinese and foreign figures who were preparing for the time when China’s aviation dreams fully took off. These were the visionaries, hucksters, engineers, business promoters, regional power brokers, environmentalists, military pilots, airline
entrepreneurs, and miscellaneous aviation enthusiasts who believe that China is about to enter its own aviation age.

I first looked into their world largely out of personal fascination, but over the years I became convinced that this was another crucially revealing subelement of Chinese life and prospects, with potentially important implications for the rest of the world. Life around the coal mines, life at the universities, life among the veterans of the Cultural Revolution who are trying to cope with (or suppress) memories of their individual and collective past—each of these says something about the country’s overall possibilities. So it is with the people who are now negotiating with the military to open up China’s skies, imagining a Chinese counterpart to Boeing, Airbus, and NASA, and reflecting on what the aviation boom in China, the world’s biggest, will mean for the country’s natural environment and that of the entire planet.

The people in this world include: The engineers hoping to build a Chinese counterpart to and competitor for Boeing and Airbus. The Boeing and Airbus officials—and smaller counterparts from Embraer and Dassault and Cessna and Diamond—trying to stay in the Chinese market and remain ahead of the competition. The provincial boosters and dreamers from the wilds of China who imagined that building a vast new airfield would be the secret to their area’s prosperity. The foreign pilots who had been furloughed by airlines in the developed world and hired on for service as “freight dogs” (air-freight pilots) or instructors in China’s burgeoning flight-academy business. The Chinese officials planning where to build the next dozen new airports, and the foreign architects and engineers and environmental consultants desperately competing to be cut in on those deals. The Chinese and international researchers
working to produce jet fuel from algae in hopes of offsetting the environmental effects of the aviation boom, on China and the world. The sales reps for American, European, and Brazilian airplanes and helicopters trying to sell their aircraft—who in some cases ended up selling their companies as a whole to Chinese bidders. And the people across China who, much as happened to Americans with the coming first of the “jet age” in the late 1950s and then of cheap deregulated air travel in the late 1970s, were changing their sense of the country and themselves through the idea of quick travel by air.

Almost any activity in China involves a lot of people, and so it is with Chinese aviation. The city of Xi’an alone has more than 250,000 aerospace engineers and assembly workers, about eight times as many as in the comparable U.S. aviation center, Seattle. That difference in volume says something about the gap in output and productivity levels too—with their much smaller workforce, the U.S. factories still produce most of the world’s airplanes, from Boeings down to Cirruses and Cessnas. Still, the scale of the coming Chinese effort can seem fearsome and unstoppable. Late in 2011 a new company called the China Business Aviation Group played on that impression by announcing that “the giant had awakened” and predicting China’s inevitable domination of the business-jet market worldwide.
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But the realities behind the scale and numbers, in aviation as in so many other aspects of China’s development, are more complicated, sometimes less impressive, and always more interesting than they seem from afar. The comedy and infighting that coexist with grandiose national planning; the corruption and small-town parochialism that give policies such a different effect in the hinterland than was intended in the capital—these apply in aviation as they do in the “green tech” boom, the boom in higher education, and many other areas. The biggest difference
between being a foreigner inside China and watching it as a foreigner from outside is how much more precarious and uneven the state of China’s “success” seems from within, and the different view one gets as to how China’s growth will affect the rest of the world.

There is no one China story or “complete” picture of China. That is the theme I stressed repeatedly in the
Atlantic
articles I wrote while I was living in China and that also guides this narrative. The first step toward reckoning with what is knowable about China’s rise is remembering how diverse and contradictory conditions within the country can seem to be. Trends both good and bad in China’s development can be identified, but every one of them has its exceptions and uncertainties.

Perhaps the strongest and most important of these general trends in China is the sense that
things are possible
. Many Americans and Europeans have that in their personal lives; it’s very strong for those in the scientific, technological, and pop-culture businesses, but it has all but vanished from public life in many developed countries. The electorates in most of North America, Europe, and Japan know very well what their countries’ main problems are. They just lack any belief that their governments will grapple with those problems or even that governments should try. China’s problems are far worse and more obvious, starting with the rampant pollution and thoroughgoing environmental destruction that have become the nation’s major public-health threat and challenge to its long-term development. But three decades into the modernization kicked off by Deng Xiaoping, most people seem to imagine that problems
will be solved, or at least that life will be better five years from now than it was five years ago.

The part of Chinese ambition that is channeled into aerospace parallels this larger trend, and its progress in this field is a close marker of its overall modernization. In the 1980s, China’s airlines were antiquated and genuinely dangerous. Through most of the past ten years, they have been statistically among the safest in the world, and more comfortable than most in North America or Europe. Who remembers the last Economy Class seat on a U.S. airline that came with a meal as part of the price? I cannot remember being on a Chinese airline flight of any duration that did not include a hot meal—usually fish, chicken, or pork with either rice or noodles. The old airline system was a proxy for China’s general backwardness, and the current one is an indicator of its progress and ambition, in surprisingly revealing ways.

Designing and building modern airplanes is even more complex than it seems, incorporating simultaneous advances on many separate technological fronts. Materials science (so the planes can be lighter and stronger), engine design (so they can fly more reliably on less fuel), electronics and avionics (as the plane’s control systems and sensors become one enormous interconnected computer), large-scale coordination of supply chains and performance schedules, and more. Running a successful airline requires a combination of retail-level customer-handling skills, to keep the level of hatred and frustration felt by the flying public from driving them away from air travel altogether, and complex integration of route structure, fare changes, crew scheduling, the passenger-versus-cargo mix, and many other variables.

At the national level, keeping air travel safe enough to seem First World rather than Third World is the most complex
undertaking of all. It requires uniform maintenance and safety standards for airports in every remote corner of the country; a network of air-traffic controllers who know how to work within their own system and with the airlines’ pilots and dispatchers; the ability to collect accurate weather reports from around the country, and get them to pilots and controllers in real time, while feeding the data into supercomputers to forecast hazardous patterns; a system for training pilots, mechanics, and inspectors and indoctrinating them into a safety-first culture; check-and-balance procedures that detect and correct those not fully indoctrinated and that keep any individual or organization from taking too many risks; and more. A modern air-travel system also requires a degree of integration across national borders—U.S. planes flying across the Caribbean routinely talk with controllers in Havana—and across organizational boundaries within each country, since military, commercial, and civilian authorities must coordinate their use of airspace. Therefore it is not just techno-chauvinism that leads rising nations to think that a functioning aerospace and air-travel system is a meaningful indication of full-fledged development.

Modern China is the world’s great success story at the “hard” elements of this achievement: creating infrastructure, lowering production costs, doing any- and everything at a great scale. But it has yet to show comparable sophistication with the “soft” ingredients necessary for a fully functioning, world-leading aerospace establishment. These include standards that apply consistently across the country, rather than depending on the whim and favor of local potentates. Or smooth, quick coordination among civil, military, and commercial organizations. Or sustaining the conditions—intellectual-property protection, reliable contract enforcement and rule of law, freedom of inquiry and expression—that allow first-rate research-and-developments
institutions to thrive and to attract talent from around the world.

If China can succeed fully in aerospace, then in principle there is very little it cannot do. The combination of economic power and autocratic political control that has made the Chinese story so successful thus far seems, from a Western perspective, to be self-limiting, because it is a contradiction. The Chinese model has worked to bring a mainly peasant economy into the low-wage manufacturing era. But—the reasoning goes—it will be hard to sustain the controls as more Chinese people become rich, urbane, independent-minded. Or, if the government insists on maintaining the controls, it will be hard to move the economy beyond the stage of reliance on low-wage industries and copycat goods.

Aviation in all its aspects will be a test of these theories. For success, China will need the strengths it has already demonstrated, and ones it has yet to master.

A man who had served in the People’s Liberation Army Air Force before immigrating to the United States in the 1980s told me the following story of China’s introduction to the world of international aviation.

As Henry Kissinger planned his secret trip to China in 1971, airport officials in Beijing were concerned. Kissinger would be arriving on a Boeing 707 operated by Pakistan International Airlines. To conceal the fact that he was going to China, Kissinger had feigned illness while on a trip to Pakistan, which explained his absence from official functions there. For extra security he traveled from Islamabad to Beijing not in an American-government aircraft but one from PIA, which had operated scheduled service to China since the mid-1960s.

At the time, the 707 was one of the most recognizable aircraft in the world. It was the airplane that more than any other had made jet age intercontinental travel feasible in the 1960s. An Air Force version of the 707 also served in those days as
Air Force One
, as it had during one mission that commanded attention around the world: bringing John F. Kennedy’s body back from Dallas in 1963.
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But 707s did not normally fly into the People’s Republic of China. Its airports were closed to most Western airlines, and its
own commercial and military fleets used mainly Soviet-model airplanes. Would it have the right equipment to handle and service the plane? At an even more basic and potentially embarrassing level, how was Kissinger supposed to get from the airplane onto the ground? When the 707’s doors opened, they would be some twenty feet above the runway, and at a different height from the Soviet-made planes. Would the VIP passengers have to jump, or climb, to reach the movable stairways the Beijing authorities already had on hand?

According to my friend from the PLA Air Force, the Chinese officials did not want to buy or borrow a standard airport staircase from a Western supplier—such was their sensitivity about revelations of their technological isolation. Instead they built their own in a rush, using pictures and published specs of the 707. When Kissinger’s plane arrived they rolled out the staircase as if it were the most natural thing for them to be prepared for any sort of international aircraft.

Forty years later, China’s President Hu Jintao took a nonstop flight from Beijing’s lavishly modernized Capital Airport to Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington, for his series of meetings with President Obama. He also traveled in a very familiar Boeing plane, the latest extended-range version of the 747, painted with the livery of Air China. There was an image of a big red Chinese flag near the nose of the plane, and, next to it, the logo of Star Alliance, which linked Air China with United, Lufthansa, ANA (All Nippon Airways), Air New Zealand, and many other international airlines.