China Airborne (23 page)

A small company named Naverus, based outside Seattle, is playing a major role in the opening of these western Chinese airports. This is another illustration of the underpublicized integration of safety and environmental efforts in the U.S. and Chinese aviation systems.

In the 1990s, an Alaska Airlines captain named Steve Fulton
worked with the FAA and with Alaska officials to design the first RNP approach in the world. It was for the Juneau airport, which is so closely hemmed by mountain ranges that it had been inaccessible in its frequent bad weather. Traditional navigational systems were not precise enough to keep airplanes clear of the mountains as they dropped down toward the runway. Since no roads connect Juneau with the rest of Alaska or North America, the frequent airport closures were a big problem. Fulton’s new RNP approach for Juneau, which plotted out a very precise set of waypoints for the airplane’s autopilot to follow as it wound its way through treacherous terrain, allowed safe descent through clouds and served as a proof-of-concept for making other “impossible” airports more accessible. Soon he and his team had applied thirty more RNP approaches for Alaskan airports.

In 2003, with another Alaska Airlines captain, named Hal Andersen, and a high-tech entrepreneur named Dan Gerrity, Fulton founded Naverus to develop RNP approaches for other airports in difficult terrain. They won contracts in Brazil, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. But they were determined to make inroads in China, where aviation was growing faster than anyplace else, and where much of the planned airport expansion was in the harshest mountain settings.

When I first met the Naverus people, in Beijing, in 2007, they had just completed one historic project and were preparing for another. The achievement just behind them was an approach to what was then one of the highest and most difficult airports anywhere on earth: Linzhi, in Tibet. Linzhi’s runway is at 9,700 feet of elevation, about the same as the highest airport in North America, the one in Leadville, Colorado. But Leadville is a tiny ex-mining settlement of perhaps two thousand people, while
Linzhi is one of the major cities of the Tibetan plateau, with a population of perhaps two million. For three hundred days of the year it rains in Linzhi, and on the other sixty-five days the weather is rarely good enough for pilots to fly under Visual Flight Rules and find their way through the 18,000- to 20,000-foot escarpments alongside the narrow valley in which Linzhi sits.

Lhasa is the next airport to the west, two hundred fifty miles away; Bangda, an even more remote Tibetan setting that has the highest-altitude commercial airport in the world, is about one hundred fifty miles to the east. Because the surrounding territory was so impossibly steep, only a few light airplanes had ever landed at Linzhi; no “transport aircraft”—airliners or cargo planes—had ever touched down on its runway. As with so many infrastructure projects in China, the big, new Linzhi airport with its broad runway had been built first, with practical questions about its feasibility coming second. “They just picked a location and built an airport there,” Steve Fulton told me in Beijing. “Only after that did the operational people look around to see whether anyone could actually fly there.”

After Fulton and his team persuaded Chinese aviation officials to let them try an approach for Linzhi, he got his first in-person look at it. He flew to Lhasa and made the ten-hour drive eastward, through twisty mountain roads, to Linzhi. The airport itself proved to be beautiful and modern, with a long, well-paved runway. But the terminal was practically vacant. “They had their firetrucks, their Jetways—but no action,” he said. His next step was to use his own handheld GPS and begin making precise measurements of the location and elevation of significant areas around the airport. Foreigners are in theory forbidden to do this kind of mapping in China, because of holdover national-security concerns. Fulton explained that he had
to make the measurements, because the official Chinese maps were so imprecise or wrong. “Through this process, I think the Chinese themselves began to see the importance of accurate terrain information,” Fulton said. “If it’s wrong, you crash.”

By 2006, after eighteen months of work, the approach was drawn up, and the autopilots had done fine—in simulations. But no real airliner had flown the course in real circumstances. On July 12, 2006, Fulton joined a group of Chinese pilots and aviation officials crowded into the cockpit of an Air China 757 as it made a historic first test flight into Linzhi.

The last six minutes of that approach are on video at the Naverus Web site,
⁷
and they are riveting. The crew is talking in Chinese the whole time, but you can hear Fulton’s voice in the international language of aviation, English, calling out altitudes as they head down. Because this was a test flight, and no one had proven that the autopilots could keep them from running into a mountain in the clouds, they were required to conduct the flight under Visual Flight Rules conditions. Fulton had carefully arranged with the Air China crew about the circumstances under which they would break off the flight rather than risk disaster if it turned out that the mapping was wrong or the autopilots didn’t work.

“As we turned each corner in the valley and went into each new segment of the approach, we kept being
just
under the clouds,” Fulton told me. Indeed, that is what the video shows—the cloud level coming down, and the plane descending just enough below it so that the pilots could still see ahead of them. “It was a kind of ballet down the river valley, with sweeping turns back and forth.” Then, at 200 feet above ground level—practically landing, from the layman’s point of view—the plane’s autopilots made an S-turn around a crag that sat between them and the runway. The plane automatically veered around
the final obstacle, aligned itself with the runway, and touched down exactly on the center line. The fifteen people jammed in and around the cockpit—including brass from Air China and the CAAC—gave a round of applause. “Captain Jiang, the senior Air China pilot, turned to me and said, ‘I have full confidence in this technology!’ ” Fulton later told me. “We all knew that people from the minister on down would have been fired if we’d crashed.” To say nothing of the effect on those aboard.

Instead, the CAAC vice minister proclaimed that “the future looks good for RNP technology in China.”
⁸
Six weeks later, the first regular commercial airline flight ever to reach Linzhi touched down, guided through clouds and difficult weather along the RNP path. Naverus won contracts to develop several more approaches in China, starting with Bangda, which at 14,219 feet is the very highest airport in the world. Then for another Tibetan airport, Nagqu, which when it opens will be even higher. The business boomed so much that in late 2009 the Naverus company was acquired by GE and is now known as GE Aviation PBN Services. Boeing and Airbus now have their own subsidiaries working on RNP approaches. There is a race to cover China with these new navigation systems that will make travel to remote areas safer, more reliable, and also more fuel efficient.

“The point is that they can navigate to any airport in the world with absolutely nothing on the ground,” Sergio von Borries, a pilot from Brazil who had become another Naverus official, told me at a conference in China. “These truly are the highways in the sky, and we are the highway engineers.”

The other potential solution to the pollution problem was hard for me to take at face value, but eventually I became semi-convinced. It is shifting to algae as a major future source of jet fuel.

China’s great advantage in many fields is that it is the place where so much of the world’s
doing
now occurs. In the effort to develop lower-carbon sources of aviation fuel, China has become the locus for efforts by Boeing and others to extract fuel more efficiently from biological sources. The concept here is not a mystery. Algae, like some more complex plants, produce hydrocarbons that can be converted to a form of oil. (Many algae produce a kind of waxy paraffin with a high oil content. Normal fossil-fuel deposits are only rarely the remains of dinosaurs; much more frequently, they come from ancient fossilized algae beds.) The trick is growing algae and harvesting its oil at a large enough scale and a low enough cost to be a plausible substitute for regular petroleum. Projects toward that end are under way around the world. Most within the United States have been sponsored and subsidized by the Pentagon, which has viewed its reliance on imported petroleum as a serious security risk. Within China, the major effort is, yet again, jointly led by Boeing and the Chinese government.

Al Bryant, a career Boeing engineer and manager, moved to Beijing shortly after the Olympics to oversee Boeing’s research-and-development efforts within China. He became famous within aviation circles for his role as a traveling proselytizer for the importance of biofuels in general and algae in particular. His presentation centers on a graph that projects
likely emissions from airline travel through the year 2050. This chart has been the premise for Boeing’s argument that it is time for an all-out effort for practical biofuels, especially from algae. The presentation’s main feature was a chart showing that the hoped-for carbon improvements from biofuels would not simply keep the aviation industry from grossly increasing CO
₂
emissions as traffic goes up but actually reduce them below their 2009 levels.

When a jet engine burns fuel that comes from algae, it emits carbon dioxide just as if it were burning fuel pumped straight from the Persian Gulf. But the algae would have removed at least as much CO
₂
from the atmosphere while it was growing. So in principle, and with allowances for inefficiencies and fuel costs in the production process, algae-based fuel could allow airplanes to run on something much closer to a “carbon-neutral” basis, also sometimes called operating on “current carbon cycles” versus the “fossil carbon cycle” of burning coal or oil.

The aerospace argument for new biofuels takes full account of America’s ethanol disaster in the 2000s. In one of the worst policy mistakes of modern times, the U.S. government subsidized farmers to grow crops, mainly corn, that could be converted into ethanol and blended into gasoline supplies. This made no sense in energy-efficiency terms. (It took more energy to plant, fertilize, harvest, and process the corn than the ethanol yielded.) It made no sense in economic terms, except as a subsidy to the farmers and agribusiness. It made no sense in moral terms, since it diverted crops that could be used for human or animal feed into transportation fuel. So the aerospace standard is to find biofuels that don’t directly or indirectly compete with the human food supply; that represent true carbon savings, as corn-based ethanol never could; and that can be sustainably
grown and harvested without depleting water supplies or doing other long-term damage.

Whatever biofuel the aviation industry creates must have the same “energy content” as current fuels, so that aircraft as big and heavy as today’s fleet can fly at comparable speeds. It must be compatible with the design and technology of current jet engines. It must be compatible with the existing worldwide infrastructure of fuel storage and distribution. And—trickiest of all—it must be
interchangeable
with today’s jet fuel, which is stockpiled at airports around the world. “You need to be able to leave Beijing with a tank full of biofuel, go to Lima, Peru, refuel there with normal fuel, and fly back,” Al Bryant told me in Beijing. “You can’t have an airplane stuck in Lima because it can’t use regular fuel.”

By process of elimination, all these criteria have led mainly to algae. In principle it can produce hundreds of times more fuel, per acre of surface area, as oil palms (which are largely grown on land where tropical forests have been clear-cut), soybeans, corn, or other crops that can be used for biofuels. It grows and produces the oil many times faster than more complex plants—an algae crop cycle is a matter of days rather than weeks or months. It can be grown on land that is otherwise too barren or unusable, and in water that is too polluted or brackish for any other human or agricultural purpose. “The world’s entire aviation-fuel needs could be taken care of by algae facilities the size of Belgium,” Bryant said. He waited for me to make the requisite joke about the highest and best use of Belgium’s landmass, which I did. Other American and Chinese scientists I interviewed were skeptical that algae farming could become practical that quickly, or affordably, or at the needed scale. Nonetheless, Boeing’s calculations assume that a sustained world oil price of
$90 per barrel or above would make algae-based fuel economically practical, once production techniques are improved. World oil prices peaked at above $140 per barrel just before the world financial collapse of late 2008. During the crash they fell to as low as the mid-$30s, then climbed above $80 by early 2010 and remained there through 2011.

Boeing is now working with a variety of state-owned research facilities across China on sustainable-fuel projects, especially involving algae. Chinese universities and technical institutes are among the world’s leaders in algae research, especially one in Qingdao. That is the descriptively named Chinese Academy of Sciences Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology, and it is where the world’s hopes for making aviation more environmentally sustainable may lie.

The theme throughout this book has not just been aerospace and aviation. It has also been balance and tension. The balance and tension between, on the one hand, the innovation, flexibility, chaos, unpredictability, patience, humor, and improvisation that characterize Chinese society in its individual elements and that in combined force have since the 1970s helped reduce poverty and create wealth faster than any other organizational scheme in history. And, on the other hand, the fearful, shortsighted, crude and clumsy, highly personalized and subjective, often self-defeatingly harsh control measures taken by security forces always worried about where Chinese spontaneity might lead.