China Airborne by James Fallows Read Free Book Online

Chinese carriers—Air China, followed by China Southern and China Eastern—are respectively numbers one, three, andfour in valuation among all airlines in the world. The three largest U.S. carriers are numbers nine, ten, and eleven, and the top three European lines are five, twelve, and thirteen.
    Among passenger airports, Atlanta’s is still the world’s busiest, with about eighty-nine million passengers in 2010. But Beijing’s Capital Airport is already second and gaining, with about seventy-four million passengers and traffic growing by well over 10 percent a year. In 2000, the three largest cargo airports, by tonnage carried, were Memphis (as the hub for FedEx), Hong Kong (for southern China’s exports to the world), and Los Angeles (where many Asian imports arrive). In 2010, the three largest were Hong Kong, Memphis, and Shanghai. Traffic at both Hong Kong and Shanghai was up more than 20 percent from the preceding year, versus 6 percent for Memphis. 7 And none of this even counted the ambitions to open China’s airspace for the kind of business-aviation boom that has been routine in the United States, Europe, Australia, and Latin America for decades. As of 2011, China still had relatively few airports compared with more developed countries—175 total, compared with nearly 1,000 in the United States capable of receiving commercial flights plus another 4,000 or so where propeller planes and small business jets could land. But the Chinese government was already at work on 150 new airports, mainly in parts of the country that had never previously had air service.
    The Chinese ambitions extended to manufacturing too. Apart from the helicopters—and a planned jetliner that might someday take customers from Airbus and Boeing, and the regional jets—during the spring of 2011 a subsidiary of AVIC, China’s main state-run aviation corporation, bought Cirrus Aviation, the pioneering company in Duluth, Minnesota, that made the world’s most popular small propeller aircraft, including the one in which Peter Claeys and I had gone to Zhuhai.
    Around the same time another AVIC subsidiary bought Teledyne Continental, the United States–based company that made the engines for Cirrus and a number of other small planes.
    About ten days after that dinner with Mr. Xu, I was in Hong Kong, at the Asian Aerospace Expo, where organizations as large as Boeing and Airbus and as small as tour operators or three-pilot flight schools looked for customers. A Chinese man who had for some reason chosen the improbable English name Vicky—he and his business partner were known as Ricky and Vicky—had begun operations for an “FBO,” or fixed-base operator, the aviation world’s term for the kind of small-airport facility that would serve non-airline aviation.
    “Now that they”—the government—“have got Cirrus, I think you will see very good support for general aviation in China,” Vicky said. “Today we have only a few airplanes in all of China. In the United States, there are more than two hundred twenty thousand small airplanes! 8 I can say, the market here will be enormous.” Next to Vicky in the booth, I met a man named Chen, from the northeast zone of China still called Manchuria in the Western world and Dongbei, “East-North,” in China. “I had always had a dream to fly, but when I tried to the military I did not pass the body exam,” he told me, in English, referring to the military’s physical screening tests. He looked perfectly hale, and I assumed that he had run afoul of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force’s notoriously strict eyesight standards for pilots.
    Mr. Chen was a child during the Cultural Revolution and ended up in the metal-parts business. Thanks to China’s infrastructure boom, he became very rich. His company had the contract to build metal structures at towers at the 2006 InternationalHorticultural Exhibition in Shenyang, the northeastern city known as Mukden in the colonial days. The