China Airborne (17 page)

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 military 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.

American officials limited themselves to saying that the moves seemed to make good sense and would enhance the promise of China’s aviation future, rather than spelling out how closely the plans followed the recommendations of the ACP report.

The airspace seemed to be opening. The next step was to prepare Chinese companies to take advantage of this opportunity.

I watched the effort to open China’s skies from the perspective of the foreign flight instructors, the Chinese visionaries, and the veteran China-America hands like Joe T and Francis Chao who coordinated developments between the countries. But I saw it with particular interest and poignance through the course of the three-stage drama of the Cirrus Design Corporation and its ambitions in China. Compared with Boeing and Airbus, Pratt & Whitney, or GE, Cirrus is a niche player in the world’s aerospace industry. But it has unexpectedly been at the center of important decisions about China’s aviation future.

In the mid-1990s, while still in the United States, I began noticing in the aviation press increasingly excited reports concerning the young Klapmeier brothers, then of Baraboo, Wisconsin. In the inward-looking world of aerospace, they were inescapably likened to the Wright brothers a century before. Indeed, there were parallels: Like the Wrights they were Midwestern inventors and tinkerers, who could not be dissuaded from pursuing what seemed an impossible dream. Alan and Dale Klapmeier were born into an entrepreneurial family in small-town Illinois in the early 1960s, whose operations ranged from fiberglass-boat making to nursing homes. “Ours was not the kind of family where you ever assumed that you’d finish
college and then just get a job,” Dale Klapmeier told me when I first met him, in the late 1990s. “The idea was always that you’d start a business of your own.” As teenagers both Alan and Dale had learned to fly and become airplane-design enthusiasts. While Alan was in college and Dale was still in high school, they would spend the summers building mock-ups of planes with spaceship shapes and futuristic propulsion systems.

In 1984, the brothers began working together full time on their airplane designs. By 1987 they had incorporated their grandly named Cirrus Design Corporation, based in a barn in rural Baraboo. Its first product, which was a technical success but a market failure, was the VK-30, an odd-looking but very fast plane that used a “pusher” propulsion system, with its engine and propellers at the rear. It was sold as an experimental aircraft, one that didn’t have to go through rigorous FAA certification and that customers would fly at their own risk; also, it was a kit plane. Cirrus would ship off a huge crate containing the engine, major airframe parts, and all the internal controls and instrumentation, and then a customer would spend hundreds of hours of skilled labor assembling and testing the craft before it would fly. Not many of them sold. “We were looking for people who had hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on the airplane, and the skill and time to put years of work into it,” Dale Klapmeier told me in the late 1990s, long after market reality had set in. “Those people were not there.”

The brothers borrowed money from parents and friends. They persevered in developing other models, all with a radically more streamlined, modern shape than had ever been seen on small-airport tarmacs accustomed to Cessnas and Pipers. Their ST50, another very high-speed “pusher” airplane, went into production as a joint venture with Israviation, an Israeli government-sponsored aerospace firm. Then Israeli politics
turned against Israviation and its funding, and the project died after only two of the ST50s had been built.

Nearing the end of their spouses’ and their family’s patience (Alan got divorced around this time), nearing the end of their ability to borrow, nearing despair about their
Jetsons
-style dream of producing a plane that was safe, inexpensive, and convenient enough to make flying mainstream, the Klapmeiers and their team gave it one more try, with the airplane that was known as the SR20 and became the most famous small airplane in half a century. It was sleek-looking inside and out, like a leather-appointed Mercedes or BMW rather than a Jeep. It was intended to be a huge step forward in safety, with its built-in parachute for the whole plane and with computer-age graphics and navigation tools that were far more informative, intuitive, and advanced than what was available in the cockpits of most airliners. At least initially it was inexpensive, by aerospace standards. It was, in its way, the Macintosh of the small-airplane world; Cirrus, in its new headquarters along Lake Superior in Duluth, was the Apple. In 2001, I wrote a book about the Klapmeier brothers and other modern aerospace innovators,
Free Flight
. I also bought an early model Cirrus SR20 and flew it frequently, before selling it when we moved to China.

When the Cirrus SR20 came onto the market in 1999 it was an immediate hit. It was followed late in 2000 by a faster, more powerful model called the SR22. By 2003, the SR22 overtook various well-established Cessna models to become the best-selling small propeller aircraft in the world, a title it has held ever since. By the mid-2000s, Cirrus had silenced most marketing, business, and technology doubters and was extending its sales network worldwide.

Developing and certifying airplanes, especially new models from a brand-new company, takes an almost limitless amount
of up-front capital. The kinds of well-heeled clients who might consider being early customers are notably demanding and fickle. The business was terribly vulnerable to any surprising bad news—surprises in this field usually coming in the form of a fatal airplane crash. Cirrus’s entire existence was called into question by a crash in 1999, just before the first SR20 customers were due to receive their planes. That crash killed Scott Anderson, a local hero from Duluth who had gone to Stanford and then returned as an Air National Guard fighter pilot and early member of the Cirrus team. Anderson had flown most of the tests in the southwestern desert that led to development of the famous Cirrus whole-airplane parachute. But for this final test flight before the SR20 went out to customers, he was in an airplane that had not yet had its parachute installed. Because of an aileron problem, he could not control the plane. He attempted to guide it back to the main Duluth airport but instead crashed into a federal prison facility less than a mile from the airport and Cirrus’s headquarters. The company, in mourning, survived commercially only by reminding customers and the press that every Cirrus delivered to a customer would come equipped with a parachute—the parachute that Anderson had helped develop and that could presumably have saved him.

The Klapmeiers never had quite enough money for the next round of production equipment, the next increase in sales staff, the next set of computers to design the next generation of airplanes. So in 2001, just before the shock to business in general and the aviation business in particular that followed the 9/11 attacks, they sold a controlling interest in the company—58 percent of a firm their family had tightly controlled—for $100 million, to Crescent Capital. Crescent was based in Atlanta and staffed by Americans, but it was the business arm of First Islamic Investment Bank of Bahrain, that country’s sovereign
investment fund. After the sale there was a flurry of concern and criticism in the aviation world about the significance of selling this gem of American innovation to an “Islamic interest.” The real significance, as would become clear a few years later in China, was the Klapmeiers’ loss of control to a company that, as they knew from the start, hoped to get its money back out within six or seven years.

Stage one of the Cirrus drama, then, was the company’s debut as the innovative darling of the industry. Like other start-ups it was always looking for money—but it managed to keep finding it. As it was introduced into each new market—Brazil, France, England, Australia—its planes soon became best-sellers there as they had been elsewhere.

From a Chinese point of view, in 2006, when I saw Peter Claeys undertake his sales attempts from his office in Shanghai, a small airplane was purely a conspicuous-consumption luxury good. Almost no one in China who was qualified to fly an airplane could afford to buy one. Almost no part of Chinese airspace was open to legal flight by anything other than airliners or military planes. So Claeys was in the business of trying to ride China’s early luxury boom. I saw him propose to coal millionaires from Inner Mongolia the advantages of having an airplane (even though there was no place to fly it), in addition to the yachts they had bought (that they had no place to sail). At an aviation conference that I attended with Claeys, I chatted with a potential Cirrus customer from southern China who had no intention of flying the plane but thought it would be impressive if parked in front of the company’s headquarters. In the end, he didn’t buy.

Claeys spent his days in endless frustration with the realities of trying to fly a plane inside China—where to get fuel, how to get flight-plan clearance, how to train mechanics to serve the
demo planes he operated inside the country. Cirrus’s market position was unique. Less expensive airplanes, from Cessna or Piper, were far less glamorous and therefore had little value as status symbols. More capable airplanes, like Gulfstreams or Falcons, cost from ten to one hundred times as much as a Cirrus and were too expensive for mere display.

At this time, Cirrus’s prospects in China were always promising but never actually profitable. Claeys would court a rich customer, close a deal to sell a plane—only to have delivery held up for months by Chinese customs inspectors, at which point the Chinese multimillionaire might lose interest and think of buying a villa or a vineyard instead. Sometimes a purchaser would back out when a shift in exchange rates made this luxury seem too expensive, or when the tumultuous changes in the Chinese economy meant that a thriving business had suddenly failed. As of early 2008, a total of five Cirrus SR22s had reached customers within mainland China.