China Airborne

by James Fallows

  Thus, in most of the flying world, the military propelled a business that civilians had started and still dominated. China’s reentry into aviation in the communist era was under military control from the start. There was practically no tradition of civil aviation in China. At the dawn of World War II and again for the Korean War and Vietnam, the United States could call on hundreds of thousands of young men and women who had been exposed to airplanes or air shows in some way. They had no counterpart in China, and don’t even now. If you look at airspace maps of Europe or North America, the portions that are still controlled by the military are relatively small (except over the desert areas of Nevada, Utah, and Southern California, where they are very large). All the rest is for business, recreational, or commercial-airline use. If you look at an airspace map of China—well, that is an achievement in itself, since generally they have been controlled by the military and are viewed as too sensitive for foreigners to see. But if you could look, you’d see at once that the areas not controlled by the military are relatively thin, crabbed corridors connecting the biggest cities. All the rest has been off limits to everyone except the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

  There was another important structural difference in China’s approach: the centralized power of the Civil Aviation Administration of China, or CAAC, which played nearly all of the varied and sometimes conflicting roles that Western countries kept carefully divided among different official and agencies. In China, the reins were in one set of hands.

  The CAAC decided—with the military—what kind of airplanes could and should be built. (In the United States, this “certificating” role lies with the FAA, and the aircraft companies work with their customers, the airlines, to decide what kinds of planes to build.) CAAC and military engineers and designers planned the planes. CAAC inspectors certified the designs as being “airworthy.” Its factories built the planes and set the internal “transfer prices” at which they would be sold—to the flight-operations divisions of the CAAC.

  The CAAC’s flight schools trained the pilots. Its airline division set the routes, sold the tickets, and trained the flight attendants for the trips. Its maintenance people took care of the planes between flights. Its airport operators built and ran the airports. Its fuel division kept the supply tanks full. When there was a crash, as happened very often, its safety division would try to find out what had happened. It ran the airports, it ran the airlines, it ran the regulatory functions. It was like one huge military operation, with the inefficiencies that arise in such a structure.

  Through the beginning of the reform era, the Chinese system had airplanes that were mainly built and designed by the military as knockoffs of Soviet and occasionally Western models; it had a rudimentary system of internal routes; its planes did not undertake long overseas routes, because as the Australian analyst Mark Dougan pointed out13 in his history of Chinese aviation, the planes couldn’t make overseas trips without refueling, and the very act of stopping at refueling sites would have constituted a humiliating display of how poor the equipment was. The heavy industrial base that would be involved in aviation was in the protected hinterland, rather than on the coast, where the big market reforms would start; the whole operation was run by a central ministry, which itself was answerable to the military; and this was part of China’s presentation of itself to the world.

  And the airplanes …

  3 * The Men from Boeing

  I first saw airplanes from China’s old fleet in 1986, when my wife and our then young children traveled by CAAC planes from Beijing to Shanghai and Guangdong. We went by CAAC because there was no alternative; foreign carriers didn’t service domestic routes in China, and private Chinese airlines had not been allowed to emerge. What my wife swears she remembers—that we could see parts of the ground through holes in the airplane’s fuselage—probably can’t be true, since it would have kept the plane from being pressurized. And yet in those days the airlines might have stayed at low enough altitudes to make a plane with holes technically flyable.

  Tickets were written out by hand, as throngs of passengers crowded around the few airline clerks. Seats were assigned as if you were loading up a packing crate—first every seat in the very last row was filled, then the row in front of that, and then the next one, working forward, so that on any given flight every seat in the last twenty rows in a cabin could be jammed, and the first ten entirely empty.

  The planes were mainly old Soviet junkers, just beginning to be replaced by the first Boeings that the opening to the United States had made available. Through the 1970s, not long after delivery of the Boeing 707s whose sale was agreed during Richard Nixon’s visit to China, the Shanghai Aircraft Research Institute developed the Y-10. This was a four-engine jetliner that closely resembled the 707 and was powered by Pratt & Whitney engines that China had bought as part of the 707 deal. The plane’s first flight, in 1980, was a point of national pride, but it proved to be inefficient and the project was scrapped after only three aircraft were built. In the mid-1980s, by the time of our visit, the CAAC fleet also included a few Tridents from Hawker Siddley in Britain, but we only ever flew in the old Ilyushin and Tupolev models from the Soviet days. The seats lacked seat belts—or, if the belts had once been there, they had long since disappeared from the planes we took, on internal flights from Beijing to Shanghai, and later Shanghai to Guangzhou. As we walked past the First Class section on one of the flights to our seats in the very back, we saw that the luxury seats were the squat, thickly cushioned armchairs familiar from any formal Chinese meeting room, seemingly just hauled into the airplane and bolted onto the floor. Passengers moved around at all stages of flight, from takeoff to landing, as if they were on a bus or a train. Flight attendants passed sugar-wafer cookies to the passengers during the flight. The safety record in those years was terrible, as we would have guessed from looking at the equipment. But news of crashes was hushed up, so we didn’t know enough to worry.

  However challenging air travelers of the mid-1980s, like us, found the Chinese aviation system, it was nothing compared with what the first international representatives of modern aerospace had found only a few years earlier. The best known of them is E. E. Bauer, who came to Beijing in 1980 as Boeing’s first official representative in China. “We had expected cold weather in Beijing, but were unprepared for the sub-freezing temperature inside the terminal,” he wrote in his memoir, China Takes Off.1 I often had the book with me when traveling in China and would thumb through it as a token of how much the circumstances truly had changed. And also as a reminder of how often China’s technological growth and success have confounded those who assumed that practical and cultural obstacles were too great to overcome. Even Bauer felt this way early in his stay, when he contemplated the way air travel operated in the CAAC era: “As I sat in the barnlike room facing a long counter with small, teller-windowed openings in the solid plywood wall that extended to the ceiling, one for each city destination, watching the customers massed in tight groups, jockeying for positions in front of the windows, everyone shouting and gesticulating, I feared with certainty that the Chinese would never break out of the cocoon that has inexorably bound them for so many centuries.”2

  I emphasize Bauer not just for his observations but because of the central and, relative to its reality, underpublicized role that Boeing has played as a third party to interactions between the U.S. and Chinese governments. E. E. Bauer exemplified an early part of that interaction; his successors illustrate it now.

  E. E. Bauer and the early days

  Bauer was a veteran Boeing engineer and manager with little experience outside the United States. He got to Beijing soon after Deng Xiaoping’s 1979 state visit to Jimmy Carter at the White House had cemented China’s new opening to the West. At the time, six different U.S. airlines had, each on its own, a fleet larger than the entire Chinese inventory of passenger airliners. The CAAC was about to receive its first three Boeing 747s. This purchase—like all major airline sales in the modern a
ge—was as much a diplomatic gesture as a commercial transaction, constituting a big and noticeable U.S. export to China. After Richard Nixon’s visit to China, Zhou Enlai had approved the purchase of ten Boeing 707s as a goodwill gesture in U.S.-Chinese relations, and with little regard to what markets they would serve or how they might pay their way.3

  On his arrival in Beijing, E. E. Bauer found that every safeguard that made for reliability in an air-transport system was at odds with the Chinese model of the time.

  For instance: By Boeing procedures, certain materials or pieces of equipment had the equivalent of an operational “use by” date. Once they had been in service for a given period of time or a stated number of “flight cycles” (takeoffs and landings), they had to be replaced—whether or not they were actually used up or worn out. Fixed replacement schedules for parts and supplies were an important protection against planes taking off with defective equipment.

  After their years of privation, making-do, and duct-taping their way around shortages, the Chinese maintenance staff found the concept of scheduled obsolescence to be wasteful and offensive. They wanted to recycle tires that still had tread on them, reuse engine oil if it still looked clean, put washers back on if they looked okay. “The all-saving society, where even scraps of newspapers were culled out of garbage for reclamation”—a process anyone who has walked through Chinese cities can witness even today—“did not accept the idea of discarding anything remotely reusable,” Bauer wrote.4 Mechanics liked to rinse out the filters in the airplanes’ hydraulic systems, rather than replacing them at the set service-life intervals. After the filters were washed, they looked perfectly clean! The problem, as Bauer pointed out,5 was that invisibly small metal fragments were still embedded in the filters—and after the filters had gone through enough cycles of being subject to three thousand pounds per square inch of pressure, the metal particles would begin seeping out the other end, into the engine works, and promptly destroy a multimillion-dollar engine.

  He also warred constantly against the overhang of the state and of military style rather than market-minded thinking and planning. One morning in April 1982, as the 747s were being integrated into the fleet of 707s and Soviet legacy planes, Bauer steamed in frustration watching a lineup on the taxiway at Beijing’s airport. Two months earlier, the airport had opened a second runway, capable of handling the biggest and most modern aircraft in the world. But some days the central authorities forgot about the new runway or neglected to approve its use. “No on-the-scene initiative could be undertaken by the controllers” who were actually at the airport, Bauer wrote. “They had their orders.”

  Bauer watched ruefully as six full-sized airliners—two Ilyushins, two Tridents, a 707, and a 747—waited with engines running on a taxiway, while another airplane used the same runway for the routine landing practice known as touch-and-goes. “The 747, with its four 50,000-pound thrust engines gobbling fuel, was still waiting in line, followed by the four-jet IL-62” and the other airplanes, Bauer wrote. “All this in a society which prided itself on saving scarce resources, particularly energy.…”6

  Remnants of the same mentality can still be found all across China, and other poor countries; but the world Bauer operated in has been transformed. Part of the responsibility lay with his successors, like “Joe T.”

  Joe T becomes “half Chinese”

  Joe T’s full name is Joseph Tymczyszyn, pronounced tim-chihzin. His father’s family was from Poland. His name is a mouthful even for Americans, and in China no one tries. There he is known to Chinese-speaking friends as Ding Zhou—a major decision for a foreigner is the choice of the right Chinese name—and often to non-Chinese as Joe T, which is also the name printed on his business card.

  Early in his career Joe T had done regulatory and engineering work at the FAA and had worked briefly in politics, as a staff assistant to Representative Barry Goldwater in Washington. In the early 1980s, he joined Boeing in Seattle. He spoke good French, and much of his work involved regulatory coordination with airlines and agencies in Europe. Then a supervisor told him that his next project would be in China.

  “At first I was upset,” he told me, when I first met him in Beijing in 2008. “I was grumbling until I looked at the sales forecasts, which changed my mind. In Boeing you are always looking at layoffs, and China was going to be Boeing’s number one international customer.” He knew that the people who survived layoffs through the ups and downs of Boeing’s employment cycles were those who, as he put it, were “the very top guys in an area where they’re not going to eliminate the whole group.” He threw himself and his family into learning spoken Mandarin, starting the same way my family had when we were first learning Japanese a few years before: He bought a Chinese in Ten Minutes a Day book, which like ours for Japanese included little stickers to put on the refrigerator, the front door, the TV and radio, and the bookcase with reminders of the names for those objects in the new language.

  He was assigned to Chinese projects in 1992; he made his first trip to China in 1993; and he commuted there regularly over the next ten years. In 2002, he retired from Boeing and moved to Beijing, where he has lived ever since. He initially worked again for the FAA as their representative at the U.S. embassy in Beijing. He has since held other jobs, all involving U.S.-China aviation projects. Some days he works at a Chinese aviation university, where he speaks Mandarin with his coworkers. He jokes that they tell him he has become “half Chinese.” His two sons, now in their early thirties, studied Mandarin at the Beijing Language and Culture University; his wife has learned the language too. “Not all Americans will have the opportunities my sons did,” he told me recently. “But I feel that young people today really need to know China in order to have the tools needed to succeed in what will be a tougher environment for Americans.”

  As E. E. Bauer was part of Boeing’s effort to introduce China to the modern aviation age, Joe T has witnessed the rapid next steps forward. In the early 1990s, a major challenge for Chinese aviation, and also for Boeing in its hopes to sell large numbers of airplanes, was the unsafe nature of flying there.

  Boeing officials knew that their success in the China market depended on several factors beyond their control, and several others they could hope to influence. Boeing could not affect the plans of economic development inside China, nor the pace of its opening to the outside world. But it could play some role in the overall climate of relations between the countries, which, given the political symbolism of aircraft sales, could make a difference in how many Boeings the Chinese decided to buy. When Hu Jintao came to the United States in 2006, his first stop was not Washington, D.C., or anyplace in the vicinity (unlike the 2011 trip, when he flew straight to Andrews Air Force Base). President George W. Bush had offered him only a business lunch at the White House, not a formal state dinner, so on his first visit to America as China’s President, Hu touched down at Paine Field, north of Seattle in Everett, Washington, which adjoins Boeing’s 747-assembly plant. There he toured the factory and saw some aircraft destined for service in China being completed, before attending a dinner that evening at the home of Bill Gates. “Boeing is a household name in my country,” Hu told five thousand Boeing workers at the factory, plus an assortment of Chinese-Americans from the area.7 “When Chinese people fly, it is mostly in a Boeing plane. I am happy to tell you that I came to the United States on a Boeing plane.”8 In 1993, then-President Jiang Zemin had also begun his trip to the United States with a stop at Boeing.

  In addition to these indirect efforts to foster good feelings with an important customer country, Boeing had a direct stake in improving the safety record of Chinese airlines, and felt it had a responsibility to do what it could. If commercial airliners kept crashing—as five of them did within a four-month span in 1992, including an accident in southern China in which more than 140 people aboard a Boeing 737 died—neither Chinese nor foreigner passengers would ride on them, and Boeing’s prospects would be limited. Thus, making Chinese airlines safer
became Boeing’s job, which meant that it was the job of all members of its China team.

  Rule of man and rule of law

  As with air travel in most other parts of the world, the majority of crashes in China occurred either on takeoff or on landing. This makes sense as soon as you think about it: That’s when the aircraft is in the most vulnerable position, since it is closest to the ground. But other aspects of Chinese procedure were out of sync with standards anywhere else.

  Many of the problems stemmed from the centralized, Soviet-style model of China’s aerospace organization, in which the all-powerful CAAC controlled everything from ticket prices to safety standards. Moreover, inspections procedures and other steps toward safer operations reflected the spirit so prevalent in China then and even now—“the rule of man”—versus “the rule of law.” This mattered more in aviation than in some other fields because standardized procedures—checklists, inspections, mandatory minimums for training and operations—have been the foundations of safe operations elsewhere.

  On an early visit to the control tower at Beijing’s main airport, one foreign adviser was taken aback by problems he had barely envisioned. Controllers in the tower could not even see the airplanes they were supposed to be directing. The glass was dirty; shades were pulled down; controllers might be shuffling papers at their desks even when they were telling airplanes where to move along the taxiways. Moreover, the obsessive adherence to rules and procedures that had made civil aviation so safe in the outside world was still unfamiliar in Chinese organizational life, despite the changes since E. E. Bauer’s time.

  One example was the Minimum Equipment List (MEL). Before a pilot can operate a certified airplane of any sort, especially one certified for commercial flight, he or she must be familiar with the MEL. This is the list of parts that must be present and properly functioning before a plane is allowed to take off. Pilots take quizzes for each type of plane. If the red and green navigation lights on the wings don’t work, are you allowed to make a flight? What about if it’s clear weather? Do you need to carry extra fuses to fly that plane? Are the standards different for daytime and at night? The idea is that there is a list, and the list is law. If the MEL says that a plane can fly without its red and green lights—but only during the day—then you can take off, assuming that your planned route will let you land before dark. Otherwise, you can’t. In private-plane flight or charter operations, pilots are responsible for observing the MELs and similar regulations. For the airlines, there are multiple redundant checks: flight crew, airline dispatches, mechanics, along with regulators all have to agree that every requirement has been met before a flight can take off. The most junior inspector, armed with a rule book, can overrule a senior airline official and say it is not safe to fly.