China Airborne (9 page)

Even the training of pilots was diversified. In Europe and North America, the military directly trained a number of pilots (many of whom eventually left to join the civilian airline fleets), and specialized “aeronautical universities”
¹²
were created to train others, along with mechanics and air-traffic controllers. By the 1950s, the United States had built more than four thousand airfields, large and small, across the country. Some were military bases, some big commercial airports, some rural or private landing strips; some were civic booster projects to attract
businesses to remote communities or make it easier for residents to reach big-city services. There were a lot of them, and the great majority offered small flying schools or repair shops too. Only a handful have been built since then, the most notable being Washington Dulles in the 1960s, Dallas–Fort Worth in the 1970s, and Denver International in the 1990s. Meanwhile hundreds of smaller airports have been closed.

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 out
¹³
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 …

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.

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 age—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’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.