China Airborne

by James Fallows

  There were some blank spots in this outline, but the Weinan team could worry about those concerns later. Meanwhile, the local authorities had gone ahead and paved what looked like the main runway at Dallas–Fort Worth airport, minus either Dallas or Fort Worth on the horizon, or any of the other sprawling developed tracts in between. The foreign visitors were stunned to walk around the tarmac in the baking heat, distracted mainly by posters showing an idealized version of how the scene might someday look.

  Through the rest of the day I filled notebooks with the local planners’ dreams and visions of what would become of these vacant zones in the bright sunshine. “Our runway apron is one hundred thousand square meters—very large!” a young English-speaking woman from the city government said. “We will have hangars, hotels, some aerospace-tech incubators.”

  It could happen. Similarly, the now-empty cities being built in western China’s frontier districts might soon be populated, and the Armani stores and Maserati dealerships in Chengdu or Wuhan might pay off. All across China, I kept running into people determined to plow ahead despite all obstacles.

  This led to a third familiar note in Weinan: a determination just to plow ahead, and to worry about obstacles later. We spent the rest of the day being entertained by musical and dancing troupes costumed in “authentic” village garb from the area. And then a few of the visitors asked about the problems no one had mentioned.

  Great plans. But …

  There were a lot of them. A constellation of obstacles made the gap between vision and the reality larger in aerospace than in many of the other high-tech or high-luxury schemes being cooked up at the same time elsewhere in China. Among the smaller problems: The country had very few pilots (fewer than three thousand, versus more than half a million with active pilot certificates in the United States and sixty thousand in Brazil). It still had very few airplanes, and the network of supply bases, fueling facilities, repair-and-maintenance shops, and other unglamorous but essential parts of the aerospace infrastructure were also undeveloped.

  Flight schools were a particular problem for Chinese aviation. Flight training is a boom industry across China, as the airlines scramble to find crews for the steadily increasing schedule of flights. Chinese passenger airlines and freight-haul operations place “pilots wanted!” ads in North American and European aviation magazines.*

  At every flight school or airport I visited across the country, I met young foreign pilots and flight instructors who had come to China because they thought it was the land of opportunity in flight.

  For instance, in a “small” town in eastern China with a population of about four million, in 2009 I met a North American woman in her early thirties, and her slightly older European husband—they asked me to conceal their identities. Her job was to teach “aviation English” to young Chinese pilots; his was to teach them how to fly. While stuck in jobs they didn’t like in North America, they had seen an ad in a flight magazine promising the great opportunities available in China.

  From this couple I heard the same complaints I had heard at flight schools in several other locations in China. The students were poorly motivated, since in many cases they had been chosen for having good eyesight rather than for any particular interest in the skies. Their curriculum had the overemphasis on rote memorization and tests that was the bane of Chinese schools more generally. “I find that my ‘textbook’ for teaching English is the Boeing technical manual of the 747,” the young American woman told me. “So rather than real English I am supposed to explain to them what a ‘sugar-scoop air inlet’ means.” All training flights would be grounded for thirty minutes before and after the arrival of any commercial flight—no controller wanted to take a chance on a conflict or error. But during that time, as I saw in two regional airports myself, the instructors would keep the engines running on the grounded training planes. This burned out the engines (which overheat if they don’t have air rushing through them at more than 100 mph for cooling) but counted as “training time” for their payroll purposes and for the students’ instruction.1

  But all these were incidental compared with the awkward fact that the kind of flying that the Weinan pioneers hoped to promote was still illegal in most of China. The Chinese military still “owns” most of the airspace in the country. Even the major airlines working from the big international airports had to humor, cajole, and wait out the PLA authorities for permission to fly. Compared with the flight corridors in and out of any other major world airport, those from Shanghai and Beijing were narrow, cramped outlets, which snaked through military-controlled airspace and made chronic delay and congestion almost inevitable. On the afternoon of December 1, 2006, all flights in and out of Shanghai’s Pudong International Airport, at the time the second-busiest in China, were canceled without warning. Planes headed into Shanghai were rerouted elsewhere. The weather was fine, and none of the airport’s equipment had malfunctioned, nor was there a terrorist threat. For hours there was no official explanation of what was happening; eventually, terse press accounts said only that the Central Military Commission had ordered the airport closed for several hours. Normal operations finally resumed that night. “Imagine if in the United States the U.S. Air Force decided to close Los Angeles’ LAX airport for an afternoon, without any explanation or apparent reason,” Christopher Jackson, an aviation analyst based in Hong Kong, wrote about the incident. “Imagine being shrugged at by airport ground staff, and told that ‘military exercises’ had caused your flight to be cancelled. This sort of thing has long been accepted as standard operating procedure in China.”2

  At smaller airports, I have seen civilian airport managers present local PLA officials with “red envelopes,” including cash, at holiday time, or build “goodwill” in similar ways. “Very rarely will a military official say, ‘I won’t let you fly unless you pay me,’ ” a Western aviation expert who has worked for years in China told me. “Instead they’ll say, ‘I understand your problems! And if only our office had more modern computers or if our fax machine worked, we might be able to concentrate and do a better job.’ Or they will point out the window and say, ‘Yes, I would like to help, but right now I am worried about the terrible condition of my car.’ ” Another official told me that through the first decade of the twenty-first century, China’s civilian aviation authorities “kept having to buy airspace from the PLA, mainly the little corner zones that allowed them to straighten out the main commercial routes and that can make a big difference in scheduling.”

  As wealth spread through the country, I heard more and more reports of people just deciding to fly despite the PLA. They went very low over roadways, in helicopters, in the flat southern parts of China—and in the mountainous west, they could fly at safer altitudes in airplanes, knowing that most of the region was beyond radar coverage. (Radar works on line-of-sight principles. If a hillside or other barrier shields a “rogue” plane from beams sent from the radar station, the radar operators have no idea that it is there.) But the new airparks couldn’t operate sub rosa, and the question across the Chinese aviation world was when the PLA would back off.

  The Chamber of Commerce meets the PLA

  By 2010, the PLA was beginning to do so, and again for a reason practically never mentioned in the Chinese or U.S. press. Years earlier, both Boeing and the FAA had played a crucial, discreet role in bringing Chinese airlines up to acceptable safety standards. Something similar was about to happen with the business jets and private planes that both Chinese and foreign enterprises viewed as an upcoming bonanza.

  Within the United States, the name Chamber of Commerce implies either a booster operation at the local level or a mainly conservative political lobby in Washington, D.C. But within China, the two main “AmCham” organizations—the American Chambers of Commerce in Shanghai and Beijing—have proven to be tough, technically sophisticated, nonpartisan organizations that have often served as a necessary go-between and third party to ease dealings between the two governments. In the early da
ys of the Obama Administration, American officials talked up the importance of joint Chinese-U.S. energy projects of various kinds. They did so both as a way of dealing with climate problems and in hopes of giving American firms a bigger share (compared with their technically advanced European, Japanese, and Korean rivals) of China’s rapidly expanding market for clean-energy installations. But the Chinese government research institutes and the huge state-owned enterprises that dominated China’s coal, electricity, and nuclear businesses found it awkward or confusing to deal with disparate American firms. Thus the AmCham of Beijing created the Energy Cooperation Program, or ECP, which was paid for by its members, and which provided a way for several dozen U.S. firms to coordinate their dealings with large Chinese counterparts. The firms were as sizable and established as GE and Honeywell, and as small as some electric-car and solar-power start-ups. “We’re like one of those chemical agents, where you place one little drop in the water and suddenly it makes the crystals form,” Sabina Brady, a long-time resident of Beijing who was the ECP’s first director, told me in 2010. “The catalyzing process starts early, before you even talk to the Chinese, because it forces the industries to talk with each other. And then the Chinese are much more comfortable feeling there is one place where they can talk with ‘the American side.’ ”

  The ECP was modeled on the Aviation Cooperation Program, or ACP, sometimes known more grandly as the Wright Brothers Partnership, which the AmCham of Beijing had created late in 2003. It brought together United States–based companies that are ordinarily rivals—the main engine makers, GE and Pratt & Whitney; both Textron, which makes Cessna jets, and its competitors from Hawker Beechcraft; avionics makers like Honeywell and Rockwell Collins; both FedEx and UPS; United Air Lines along with American, Delta, and Northwest; architects and airport-equipment companies; plus others as large as Boeing and as small as the fledgling Cirrus—and put them under the public-private umbrella of the American Chamber of Commerce and the U.S. Department of Commerce’s own Trade Development Administration. As its executive director, it chose the obvious candidate: Joe T, who had worked for both the FAA and Boeing and was a familiar figure to the Chinese from his visits and training sessions with CAAC.

  The Aviation Cooperation Program soon became an important vehicle for connecting Chinese and U.S. companies, agencies, and individuals, and bringing Chinese institutions into ever greater conformity with international norms.3 The ACP has arranged regular meetings between officials of the FAA and the CAAC. It has operated programs to train Chinese air-traffic controllers and airworthiness inspectors for Chinese airliners. Every year it sends a team of CAAC administrators and rule-makers to the United States for several weeks, where they receive executive management-development courses at air-traffic-control centers, at pilot-training sites for the major airlines, and at Boeing’s assembly plant.

  In the fall of 2006, a group of Chinese officials had come to Washington for a meeting of the every-other-year U.S.-China Aviation Summit, sponsored by the U.S. Trade Development Agency. During the day, many of them went to the FAA’s Air Traffic Control System Command Center outside Washington. There they saw military officials working alongside civilian regulators, and in constant contact with representatives from the airlines and business-aviation organizations, to reroute flights and open corridors through military airspace as weather and traffic conditions demanded. It was a complete contrast to the norm in China, in which the military fiercely kept its airspace separate from civilian use. At twilight, the group went for cocktails to a rooftop restaurant at the Kennedy Center in downtown Washington. The wind was from the south, so flights landing at National Airport wound their way down the Potomac River, passing alongside the Kennedy Center at less than 1,000 feet elevation. “No one in Beijing had seen aircraft above the city,” he told me several years later; airline flights were far out of town, and helicopters were very rare. “They got very excited and could hardly believe what they were seeing. They said, There’s the Pentagon! And the White House! It is four years after 9/11, and the flights just kept coming in.” The evening experience was, Joe T thought, more dramatic than any number of briefings in demonstrating what a liberalized air-traffic system might mean.

  Through exchanges and experiences like these, American officials hoped to persuade Chinese regulators to view aerospace in all aspects as a natural part of the country’s development, rather than as a security threat that needed to be fenced off carefully from the rest of life. For now let’s set aside the irony of U.S. government officials talking a less rather than more security-minded view of air travel. From the Chinese perspective, the U.S. air-travel system as a whole still seemed a marvel of making police and soldier interests take second place to commercial and recreational interests. Business and private aircraft could go virtually anywhere they wanted in the United States, with little or no advance clearance or permission needed. Hence the standard scene in corporate-intrigue movies, where the passengers on a corporate jet tell the pilot that there’s been a change in plans and they’re heading for New Orleans now, not Little Rock. Nonmilitary aircraft in China could go virtually nowhere in China without submitting flight plans for approval several days in advance.

  All this would have to change for the Weinan aerospace-utopia dreams to come true, along with their counterparts in other provinces across the country. Starting in 2007, the American members of the Aviation Cooperation Program began drawing up a United States–based manifesto for the transformation of China’s airspace rules.

  A manifesto for growth

  By the summer of 2008, the consulting firm Booz & Company completed its draft of a 160-page study called “Catalyzing Growth in China’s Regional and General Aviation Sectors,” which had been commissioned by the Aviation Cooperation Program. With dozens of charts showing trends in Chinese transportation needs, and with extensive descriptions of the history and importance of aviation not just in America but in the other big, continental-scale countries where aviation played a major business role (Australia, Brazil, Canada), the report skillfully played on a twinned fear and hope often found among Chinese economic planners. The fear was that China would remain in a backward condition relative to other modern developed economies; the hope was that China could leap ahead and, by virtue of its scale, become a leader in yet another field. The “fear” charts showed where China stood now; the “hopes” showed what it could become.

  The report also had an extensive road map for the regulatory steps China could take toward a phased and orderly opening of its airspace. First, it could create several trial zones to see what would happen if the controls came off. This proposal reflected a shrewd awareness of the steps Chinese leaders had actually taken in liberalizing their economy since 1979. Despite the image of the great monolith, China had in fact operated through the reform era as a patchwork of citywide or province-wide trials. If an approach—say, allowing more direct foreign investment—worked in its first trial near Shenzhen, then it might be expanded to Xiamen or Dalian. If it failed or didn’t work as planned, it could be closed down and some other approach would be tried elsewhere. The Booz/ACP report suggested three initial trial zones.

  One, in the bleak northeast of the country, would drop regulations so as to allow much freer use of planes and helicopters for agricultural and forestry use—crop-dusting, firefighting, transportation among far-flung sites. A second, in the industrialized southern areas of Guangdong province, would allow freer use of helicopters for business and personal transportation. In practice, this also meant legalizing a lot of the surreptitious chopper travel that was already going on. And the third proposed test zone would be … around Xi’an! This was where the proposal’s writers thought conditions would be most promising for an aerospace-industrial-resort-educational complex, very much like the one the dreamers of Weinan hoped to create.

  The report had other suggestions too, notably an experiment that would be nationwide rather than confined to one trial zone. In this proposed scheme, the mili
tary would give up control on “low level” airspace—roughly, the space between ground level and 1,000 meters above sea level—and watch to see what happened. This was a highly limited form of liberalization. In much of the country, ground level itself was more than 1,000 meters above sea level, so there would be no flying space at all. Even in the low, flat coastal areas, only helicopters and small propeller planes could operate efficiently at such low altitudes. Still, it was a start.

  Although the authors of the report could not have known or foreseen this, the Chinese government’s willingness to listen suddenly increased after the devastating Sichuan earthquake, when thousands of survivors died of blood loss, shock, and exposure in the following two or three days, as rescuers tried to reach them on foot through steep terrain where existing roads had been wiped out. Because China’s total helicopter fleet was smaller than, say, Portugal’s, and barely one thousandth as large as that of the United States, there was simply no way to get supplies in or survivors out in time. Japan had suffered a serious though not catastrophic earthquake at about the same time; rescue helicopters were overhead in less than five minutes. In many devastated areas of Sichuan, it was five days before rescuers appeared.

  The Chinese central government can ignore public opinion in many areas, but the appearance of delay, incompetence, or neglect in responding to tragedy is something it works hard to avoid. The potential to trigger popular outrage is too great. For the first few weeks after each of China’s recent earthquakes, floods, or other great natural disasters, popular mood has been stoic and supportive of the government’s efforts to save lives. But soon thereafter, bitter protests have broken out, led by parents asking why shoddily built schools collapsed onto their children, or homeless families asking who had vouched for the safety of a dam that broke. The central government took extra time examining the risks of expanded small-plane flight. But by the time the Aviation Cooperation Program held its U.S.-China Aviation Summit in the summer of 2009, the head of the CAAC made an announcement. There would be three “experimental” zones for freer flight rules: In the northeast, for agricultural flight; in the south, for helicopters; and near Xi’an, for an aerospace-industrial complex. A few months later, the Chinese government announced that the airspace from the ground to 1,000 meters above sea level would be opened for uncontrolled flight. In practice this of course created possibilities mainly for helicopters, which unlike most airplanes can operate effectively at altitudes that low. But rules for the next tier of airspace, up to 4,000 meters in elevation, were also relaxed. Pilots would still have to file flight plans in advance, but mere filing would be sufficient. They would no longer have to wait hours or days for government approval before departing. As part of the liberalization, the range of new test sites for freer flight was also expanded.