China Airborne

by James Fallows

  All the chatter between pilots and controllers, anywhere in the world, is over open radio channels, as with truckers’ old CBs. The other pilots on the frequency, apparently all of them from airlines, could hear our increasingly tense-sounding attempts to get the controllers’ attention. Finally a Japan Airlines pilot who was capable in both English and Chinese (apart, I assume, from Japanese) broke in to ask us, in English, if we would like some help. He then relayed the request, in Chinese, to the controller. Immediately the controller responded to him—partly because of the language but much more, I suspect, because talking with airline pilots seemed “normal”; we could well have been the first private pilots ever to come through his sector. The JAL pilot passed the word back to us, though we had heard it over the airwaves too. Permission to climb. One hurdle cleared.

  On through the dark and clouds toward Zhuhai. Its airport is one of a large number studding the bay around Hong Kong harbor. Geographically, the closest U.S. equivalent would be the coast of Maine or Alaska, with rocky cliffs rising sharply from the bay. Economically and commercially, the equivalent would be the greater Los Angeles basin, with roads, lights, and buildings sprawling as far in all directions as one could see. As we descended (with controllers’ permission—they were more comfortable in English here so much closer to Hong Kong) in preparation for landing, we were mainly out of the clouds while still 2,000 feet above the ground. We marveled at the lights of the industrial urban expanse while noting the large, unlit masses that signified mountains and rocky islands. Zhuhai’s airport is on the far southern extension of a peninsula, the southernmost point in the Hong Kong area. The instrument approach required circling the hills and island peaks, which is safe enough as long as you can follow the radio-guidance beam all the way down to the airport.

  As we came to the coast, the clouds thickened again, and we found ourselves in the middle of them when only 1,000 feet above the ground. Claeys had his eyes glued to the dials that showed how closely we were following the beam. If we drifted “one dot left” relative to the beam, he would nudge the plane toward the right; if we fell “one dot low” beneath the desired glide path, he would edge the plane up. I looked back and forth from those gauges to the window, waiting for the glimpse of the ground or the airport approach lights that we needed before we reached our “decision height” a few hundred feet above the runway.

  Suddenly the beam we were following, for an Instrument Landing System approach (or ILS, the most accurate system then in common use) seemed to behave strangely, and even flicker off. Momentarily there was no path to follow. This required immediate attention. We were close to the ground; we were headed down; we were among rocky peaks higher than our airplane was; and because of clouds and the dark we couldn’t see what was ahead.

  With the rational parts of our brains, we knew—and had discussed during the preceding few minutes, in the “brief the approach” discussion that is supposed to be part of the preparation for every landing—how we should respond. Airplane life is based on backups and contingencies, and every pilot who has trained for an instrument rating has practiced the “missed approach” routine that is called for if you don’t see the ground or runway lights when you descend as low as the approach-chart says you safely and legally can. But it is one thing to know that in theory, and to have done it in practice time and again. It is something else to have to decide in real time while knowing that we were lower than the surrounding hills and only a few seconds’ flight time away from the hyper-busy airspace for Hong Kong.

  The main backup plan in any situation like this is to climb immediately, since you cannot keep heading down when you don’t know what you might hit. If we climbed too much too suddenly, that could mean violating our clearance, and would bring us up into airspace where five large commercial airports had airline and air-cargo traffic merging—Hong Kong, Macau, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Zhuhai—with God knows what consequences. Of course we’d climb nonetheless; as the aviation saying went, it’s better to be around to argue about possible violations than to miss that disciplinary hearing because you have crashed. We could worry later on, too, about what had gone wrong. Had the landing signal failed or been switched off for some reason? Was it our instruments or their settings?

  Claeys and I had begun talking, tersely, about what to do next when, with the relief of a drowning person who breaks the surface to gasp air, I saw out the window that we had left the ragged bottom layer of the clouds and could see all the way to the vast, open, clearly lit main runway at Zhuhai.

  We landed. The humid 90-degree air fogged over glasses, camera lenses, and dial faces the second we opened the cockpit door. We had friends take a picture, with smiles that barely masked the tenseness we had felt.

  We got out, both sobered and giddy; we went to a nightclub in downtown Zhuhai that was called the Blue Angel and was owned by China’s most famous female pilot, Chen Yan, a glamorous bombshell who was frequently on the cover of fashion magazines and who asked me, when I first met her in the presence of her teenaged son, “Do you think I am his mother? Most people think I am his sister!” Over the next few days Peter Claeys was busy at the air show; I stayed the next day and then took a commercial flight back to Shanghai, and we never fully determined what had happened in those seconds that seemed like centuries inside the cockpit. Had there been a power failure, or a disruption in the navigation signal, as sometimes happens? Had we gotten a setting wrong? Had someone at the airport inexplicably decided it was time to shut down? At the time I had been too busy staring for breaks in the clouds to notice all the variables, and afterward there was no way to be sure. We saw the runway in time and got down—and if we hadn’t seen it, we had been prepared to divert somewhere else.

  I did not fly as a pilot or copilot again in mainland Chinese airspace. But starting that day, parallel to my day job of reporting on financiers and politicians, I followed the people in China who were trying to remake its history through taking to the air.

  1 * This Is Going to Be Big

  The trip to the Four Seasons Club

  On a freezing February evening in 2011, a little more than four years since my flight to Zhuhai, my wife and I tried to figure out how to get from our apartment in downtown Beijing to a recently opened restaurant on the far east side of town. Basic navigation in big Chinese cities can be more challenging than it sounds, and not simply for foreigners like us with incomplete language skills. I had been studying Chinese characters for many years, starting when we lived in Japan in the 1980s, and thus am comfortable enough reading Chinese maps and street signs; my wife, trained in linguistics and with a good ear in many languages, is much better at hearing and speaking. Together we are stronger than either of us separately; still the language can be a challenge.

  And far from the main challenge in finding our way to an unfamiliar site in a big, fast-growing Chinese city. So many roads are constantly being repaved, redirected, renamed, or torn up. So many subway lines, bridges, tunnels, and flyovers are continually being opened, closed, or redone. Neighborhoods are razed in the course of a weekend—in Beijing both the traditional hutong courtyard houses from before the modern era and the squat, badly insulated, brutally ugly walk-up apartments built under Mao from the fifties through the seventies. In their place, seemingly overnight and literally a few weeks or months later, appear a forty-story condo complex, a mall with car dealerships and Armani or Hermès outlets plus KFC and McDonald’s, a government research center, a Carrefour or Walmart. Maps are often of little use. While living in Shanghai, I occasionally saw a taxi driver with a city map in his car, but never once in a cab in Beijing.

  The Chinese man who would be our host that night had sent a link to the Web site for the venue he had chosen, the Four Seasons Club restaurant. This club has no connection to the familiar high-end Four Seasons international hotel chain, which has several locations in Beijing. Moreover, its name in Chinese—that is, its “real” name—was entirely different, its characters meaning Star River Club. />
  From the club’s Web site, we found that it is located near the Qingnian Road Station on Line 6 of the Beijing Metro. Good news! We had each taken well over a thousand subway trips through our years of living in Shanghai and Beijing—several trips most days, nearly each day we were in town—and always preferred them as a way of avoiding chronically clogged roads. But how would we get onto Line 6, which we had never used before, from our apartment near the intersection of Lines 1 and 10? Unfortunately, it turned out that the only way there would be via a time machine, since Line 6 would still be under construction for the next year or two. No wonder we hadn’t seen it on the subway-system maps inside the stations.

  Buses were a possibility, and one we’d used for other sites off the subway grid. But at rush hour along Jianguo Road, one of Beijing’s broadest and most heavily trafficked thoroughfares, the windows of each passing bus were dark with the overcoats of people jammed into every available cubic inch of its volume, with further huge crowds waiting expectantly on the sidewalk. And anyway we would have had to change buses several times to get where we were headed. That left taxis. When we finally saw one with the bright red “empty car” () sign illuminated, meaning that it would take passengers, I raced past a group of young Chinese women also looking for a taxi—forget chivalry, it was either that or stand around waiting all night—and got in, moving over to make room for my wife and an American friend visiting from California.

  Over the next half hour, we inched and jolted the five-plus miles to the club, through the east-side congestion of Beijing’s Fourth Ring Road and Chaoyang Road as the driver weaved in and out of construction zones. When we got within what we all reckoned to be a few blocks of the destination, he called the restaurant’s number on a mobile phone for final turn-by-turn guidance through a particularly chewed-up, trench-ridden, girder-strewn building area.

  The satellite map of the neighborhood, which we’d checked before leaving the apartment, was as out of date as any printed map. At the alleged site of the Star River hotel-restaurant-golf-course complex, it had shown only a low warren of Mao-era apartment buildings amid vegetable fields. I knew that at best the satellite view would be approximate. Chinese law requires that images of Chinese cities from Google Maps, Google Earth, and the like must be offset1 from online street maps, so you can never exactly line up a street address with a satellite image. It’s a feint at security, from a government that long viewed maps as highly sensitive information. This mentality reaches a delightful extreme in maps of the west side of Beijing: Satellite views and Google Earth show a huge airport sitting between the Fourth and Fifth Ring Roads, with a runway like the ones at O’Hare or JFK, alongside major malls and business centers. But that airport is used mainly for military and government purposes, and its existence is acknowledged neither by highway exit signs nor on city maps, which show only a big blank spot in that area.

  For our trip that evening, the mismatch was an offset in time more than in space, since there was nothing in either the satellite or the map images to suggest a business of any sort anywhere close to the destination. Yet as we neared the assigned address in the cab we saw something that in its neon lighting and its showy architecture would have fit in easily in Las Vegas.

  The club’s entrance had parapets modeled on a villa in Tuscany, or a castle from a fairy tale. A black Mercedes that appeared to have been washed and polished mere instants before sat gleaming in the driveway. Teams of attractive and spiffily uniformed young male and female attendants saluted us on entry with Chinese and English greetings. Huanying guanglin! Welcome, sir and madam! The building’s back windows looked onto the recently opened fairways of the club’s golf course.

  For the next few hours inside, we enjoyed an unusually luxurious version of that staple of Chinese business interactions, the celebratory dinner. Many courses; many welcoming toasts; much gracious plucking with long serving chopsticks of the choicest morsel of fish or meat, for ceremonial placement by the host on the dish of the honored guest. The actual head of the roasted chicken, complete with beak and comb? For me? Why, thank you so much for this gesture of respect! Because the Chinese businesspeople at the dinner had all worked and studied outside China, we were spared the rounds of competitive bottoms-up toasting, toward the intended aim of all-hands drunkenness, that typifies many gatherings in the provinces. We were spared as well a TV set turned on and blaring soap operas, game shows, or karaoke songs inside the private dining room, a standard touch of provincial banquets. Instead we had sips of wine, cups of tea, mobile phones frequently ringing and being answered, and animated discussion of Chinese-American business possibilities.

  The main business to be done that night was between representatives of U.S. and Chinese coal and power companies, pooling their efforts for research in “cleaner” coal. American, European, and Japanese companies were all coming to China to see new carbon-control, coal-gasification, and other clean-up techniques tried and improved upon, since China is where so many of the world’s plants were being built.

  But, as often happens at such gatherings, other side deals were being discussed and dreamed about at the same time, and several Chinese guests went in and out of the room to take phone calls or drop in on other business dinners they had double-booked for that same night. For instance, late in the evening, an unassuming and modestly dressed man arrived from his previous dinner. He was less urbane-seeming than the others and unlike them spoke only Chinese, rather than being able to go back and forth between languages. Despite appearances, he turned out to be the wealthiest person present; as the CEO of one of the largest battery-making companies in the world, he was there to talk not about coal but about electric cars. A few weeks earlier he had been to Washington, where he met congressmen and told them about his dream of opening factories in the United States to produce batteries for a new electric car he was helping design. “This can change the future! If I can reassure those congressmen,” he said, according to an interpreter at the table.

  Confident, can’t-wait talking and planning of this sort is familiar as both an exhausting and an exhilarating trait of modern China. I would hear the phrase “my dream is …” more often in the course of a typical month in China than in a typical decade in the United States. The person who appeared to be most excited by his dream that evening was the dinner’s host, a stocky man in his late fifties named Xu Changdong. Mr. Xu had a stake in the coal and energy discussion, to put it mildly; he personally controlled development rights to vast coal reserves in the Chinese autonomous region of Inner Mongolia, which the regional government had awarded him in exchange for his plans to open an advanced manufacturing plant there. But what really excited his passion was his newest venture, which he was sure was going to transform the country: a boom in aviation.

  The morning after this dinner, one of his companies would announce a plan to sell helicopters inside China and start building them there—including at the plant in Inner Mongolia. Also that next day, the main Chinese newspapers would splash on their front pages the story of China’s across-the-board push to become a major aerospace and air-travel power as part of the upcoming Twelfth Five-Year Plan.2 In American and European discussion, the very term “Five-Year Plan” smacks of the Soviet era, suggesting clumsy central-government efforts that are out of touch with market realities and are therefore doomed before they start. Within China, businesspeople, government officials, and members of the public take very seriously the goals and spending targets laid out in the successive Five-Year Plans. They know that this is where a lot of public money and attention will be directed. The Twelfth Plan, counting from the First in the early 1950s under Chairman Mao, would run from mid-2011 through 2016 and include a big boost for aviation, which it listed as one of the “seven major strategic industries” for the next phase of the country’s growth. Public investment in all phases of China’s aerospace future over those years would come to 1.5 trillion Chinese yuan renminbi (RMB), or about $230 billion. That was a 50 percent increase over compa
rable investment in the previous Five-Year Plan—and, depending on how you count, somewhere between five and ten times as much as the Federal Aviation Administration’s budget for capital improvements and airport construction in the same period in the United States. Dozens of brand-new airports were coming, and thousands of new airliners for China’s fleets, and many thousands of helicopters, business jets, and small aircraft of all varieties.

  “You can’t imagine how big this is going to be,” Xu Changdong said in English to the guests at the dinner. “People have the money. They have the technology. The airspace is opening.”

  You can’t imagine. By this time in China, I was beginning to.

  Xu had grown up in Shanghai, gone to New York as a penniless thirty-year-old graduate student in 1983, and stayed there for nearly twenty years as he built an import-export empire. During the 1990s, after he had established himself, he went out one summer day on an open-ocean fishing expedition off Long Island. Anglers had ringed the boat’s railings, with their backs to one another as they cast lines into the sea. Suddenly a hook that one person had flipped over his shoulder, on the backswing of a cast, caught the eyeball of someone on the other side of the boat. Xu, like the other passengers, was horrified and could hardly bear to look. But—as he remembered clearly, when retelling the story to me many years later—he was struck by the firm but low-key manner in which the boat’s captain told him and everyone else to remain calm. The captain had radioed the Coast Guard and been assured that within eight minutes a rescue helicopter would arrive to take the victim in for emergency care.

  “I looked at my watch, and even before eight minutes, the helicopter was coming,” Xu said, when he told me the story in Beijing. The rescue crew lifted the victim from the boat’s deck into the helicopter, and thence off to an emergency room.