China Airborne (10 page)

He was assigned to Chinese projects in 1992; he made his first trip to China in 1993; and he commuted there regularly over the next ten years. In 2002, he retired from Boeing and moved to Beijing, where he has lived ever since. He initially worked again for the FAA as their representative at the U.S. embassy in Beijing. He has since held other jobs, all involving U.S.-China aviation projects. Some days he works at a Chinese aviation university,
where he speaks Mandarin with his coworkers. He jokes that they tell him he has become “half Chinese.” His two sons, now in their early thirties, studied Mandarin at the Beijing Language and Culture University; his wife has learned the language too. “Not all Americans will have the opportunities my sons did,” he told me recently. “But I feel that young people today really need to know China in order to have the tools needed to succeed in what will be a tougher environment for Americans.”

As E. E. Bauer was part of Boeing’s effort to introduce China to the modern aviation age, Joe T has witnessed the rapid next steps forward. In the early 1990s, a major challenge for Chinese aviation, and also for Boeing in its hopes to sell large numbers of airplanes, was the unsafe nature of flying there.

Boeing officials knew that their success in the China market depended on several factors beyond their control, and several others they could hope to influence. Boeing could not affect the plans of economic development inside China, nor the pace of its opening to the outside world. But it could play some role in the overall climate of relations between the countries, which, given the political symbolism of aircraft sales, could make a difference in how many Boeings the Chinese decided to buy. When Hu Jintao came to the United States in 2006, his first stop was not Washington, D.C., or anyplace in the vicinity (unlike the 2011 trip, when he flew straight to Andrews Air Force Base). President George W. Bush had offered him only a business lunch at the White House, not a formal state dinner, so on his first visit to America as China’s President, Hu touched down at Paine Field, north of Seattle in Everett, Washington, which adjoins Boeing’s 747-assembly plant. There he toured the factory and saw some aircraft destined for service in China
being completed, before attending a dinner that evening at the home of Bill Gates. “Boeing is a household name in my country,” Hu told five thousand Boeing workers at the factory, plus an assortment of Chinese-Americans from the area.
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“When Chinese people fly, it is mostly in a Boeing plane. I am happy to tell you that I came to the United States on a Boeing plane.”
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In 1993, then-President Jiang Zemin had also begun his trip to the United States with a stop at Boeing.

In addition to these indirect efforts to foster good feelings with an important customer country, Boeing had a direct stake in improving the safety record of Chinese airlines, and felt it had a responsibility to do what it could. If commercial airliners kept crashing—as five of them did within a four-month span in 1992, including an accident in southern China in which more than 140 people aboard a Boeing 737 died—neither Chinese nor foreigner passengers would ride on them, and Boeing’s prospects would be limited. Thus, making Chinese airlines safer became Boeing’s job, which meant that it was the job of all members of its China team.

As with air travel in most other parts of the world, the majority of crashes in China occurred either on takeoff or on landing. This makes sense as soon as you think about it: That’s when the aircraft is in the most vulnerable position, since it is closest to the ground. But other aspects of Chinese procedure were out of sync with standards anywhere else.

Many of the problems stemmed from the centralized, Soviet-style model of China’s aerospace organization, in which the all-powerful CAAC controlled everything from ticket prices
to safety standards. Moreover, inspections procedures and other steps toward safer operations reflected the spirit so prevalent in China then and even now—“the rule of man”—versus “the rule of law.” This mattered more in aviation than in some other fields because standardized procedures—checklists, inspections, mandatory minimums for training and operations—have been the foundations of safe operations elsewhere.

On an early visit to the control tower at Beijing’s main airport, one foreign adviser was taken aback by problems he had barely envisioned. Controllers in the tower could not even see the airplanes they were supposed to be directing. The glass was dirty; shades were pulled down; controllers might be shuffling papers at their desks even when they were telling airplanes where to move along the taxiways. Moreover, the obsessive adherence to rules and procedures that had made civil aviation so safe in the outside world was still unfamiliar in Chinese organizational life, despite the changes since E. E. Bauer’s time.

One example was the Minimum Equipment List (MEL). Before a pilot can operate a certified airplane of any sort, especially one certified for commercial flight, he or she must be familiar with the MEL. This is the list of parts that must be present and properly functioning before a plane is allowed to take off. Pilots take quizzes for each type of plane. If the red and green navigation lights on the wings don’t work, are you allowed to make a flight? What about if it’s clear weather? Do you need to carry extra fuses to fly that plane? Are the standards different for daytime and at night? The idea is that there is a list, and the list is law. If the MEL says that a plane can fly without its red and green lights—but only during the day—then you can take off, assuming that your planned route will let you land before dark. Otherwise, you can’t. In private-plane flight or charter operations, pilots are responsible for observing the MELs and
similar regulations. For the airlines, there are multiple redundant checks: flight crew, airline dispatches, mechanics, along with regulators all have to agree that every requirement has been met before a flight can take off. The most junior inspector, armed with a rule book, can overrule a senior airline official and say it is not safe to fly.

Under the Soviet-style Chinese system, the MEL existed but—like other standardized procedures—was applied in a subjective way. If a gauge was broken or a part missing, an airline executive could say, Looks all right to me. Let’s fly! Strict inspection schedules could also be made more lenient. In the world of international aviation, airplanes were inspected according to rigid schedules. After a certain number of days, or flight hours, or takeoffs, an aircraft could not legally make another trip until it had had crucial parts checked. This scrutiny pays off—think how often buses, cars, trains, and subways fail, and how rarely commercial airliners do. But as of the early 1990s China’s inspection schedule was still slapdash and largely subject to “the rule of man.”

Perhaps the most important safety-related problem, as the efforts began, was the “check airman” system. In the United States and elsewhere, airlines have evolved the “check airman” system of continuing competency exams for which it is hard to imagine a full counterpart in medicine, the law, academics, or publishing. No matter how experienced and veteran the captain, he must periodically satisfy a specially trained pilot known as the check airman that he is still proficient. And the check airman, in his or her turn, must prove his continued competence through the check airmen’s records, as examiners are also subject to scrutiny by the FAA, to see how the percentage of passes and failures they are awarding compares with national norms.

Much as with MELs and scheduled inspections, the need for
check airmen and check rides was observed more in form than in reality in China. (For airliners the check rides are conducted in simulators rather than real airplanes, in order to present pilots with a wider range of emergencies and stressful situations than would be practical or safe to undergo in real airplanes.) Check rides are meaningful only if pilots are held to consistent, objective standards—and, in practice, if some of them fail. But in China the standards varied widely, and often all pilots passed. In 1997, a Chinese airliner plane crashed in Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong, killing thirty-five people and injuring dozens more.
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The crash investigation indicated basic errors by both the pilots aboard, who made two landing attempts in the middle of a thunderstorm rather than diverting to a safer landing site. Things like this happen elsewhere—for example, the Colgan Air crash in Buffalo, in 2009, led to a reevaluation of how regional airlines trained and supervised their pilots. But within the Chinese system it highlighted existing concerns that the system was not doing enough to ensure that planes—or pilots—were safe to fly.

“The check airman system was a problem,” Joe T told me, not long after the Colgan incident. “The check airmen lived with all the other pilots, their wives were friends, their kids went to the same schools, they had the same housing.” If a check airman judged one of his neighbors on a test flight, and failed him, he knew that the unfortunate pilot would lose face, would be subject to remedial training, and might possibly lose his job—all very disruptive consequences within a tight-knit community.

Through the late 1990s, the shared imperative of reducing crashes created an improbable alliance of Chinese, American, and international businesses and organizations. In 1997, two Chinese airlines—Air China and China Eastern—had already been approved for prestigious and strategically important routes
to the United States. China Southern had applied for approval to be the third, and had taken delivery of new Boeing 777s in anticipation of launching service from Guangzhou to Los Angeles. Because Guangzhou was a center of the outsourcing business, direct service there was expected to be attractive to business travelers and be lucrative for the airline.

But routes to the United States required approval from the U.S. Department of Transportation, parent body of the FAA. At the urging of the FAA, the department decided to use the application as leverage to force—or encourage—a broader improvement in Chinese safety standards. The FAA had no direct regulatory power over China Southern or any other foreign airline. But it could ask for confirmation that China’s regulatory standards, as applied by the CAAC, conformed to the worldwide guidelines laid out by international agreements. The message came back from the U.S. government to China: Before any more airlines get routes to the United States, we’d like to know more about how Chinese regulators do their business.

The Chinese airlines were naturally flummoxed. Boeing, an American company, had sold them the planes in expectation that they would be used on flights to the United States. Why would the American government get in the way of this transaction? Was this some kind of double-cross? The Chinese government would not interfere with commerce in this way! China Southern had more planes on order from Boeing, but its officials were in no mood to receive—or pay for—those planes unless this mess with the regulators got straightened out.

Boeing was not the cause of the safety problems with Chinese airlines, but Boeing decided that resolving them was partly its responsibility. In collaboration with the FAA, it began preparing a series of seminars, tours, training sessions, and briefings to
connect Chinese regulators and inspectors with their counterparts in the United States. Boeing could not legally hire current FAA employees to come to China to provide safety briefings. But it could hire recent retirees—and it contracted with several of them to come to China to size up the situation and then brief and train CAAC officials in several major cities. Joe T—who knew the FAA, Boeing, and China—was involved in coordinating this project.

Because of careful warnings by Joe T and others, the U.S. training team was hyper-sensitive about two aspects of this training exercise for their Chinese colleagues. One was to present all their recommendations in terms of meeting
international
standards for air safety and airline procedures, rather than seeming to say, This is how we do it in the U.S. of A. Presenting the challenge this way made it far more palatable to the Chinese side. Learning to comply with international standards was one more sign of modernization in China; doing things the “American way” could seem like a sign of continued subservience. The examples were, of course, from American practices at the FAA or the operational details of Boeing and United Airlines, but the leitmotif was that Americans had learned how to make their practices meet international standards, and they could help the Chinese do the same thing.

The other sign of cultural sophistication by the U.S. team was its awareness of “Chinese characteristics.” Even as the Chinese government and business officials felt they were moving toward international practices, they highly valued the idea that they were doing so in a distinctively Chinese way. Deng Xiaoping’s famous description of the country’s post-1979 market system as “socialism with Chinese characteristics” set the pattern. The term illustrated not only the flexibility of names for
the fast-moving contradictions of modern China—a “socialist” system with room for Lamborghini dealerships and the world’s starkest extremes between rich and poor—but also the importance of “Chinese characteristics,” known as
Zhongguo tese
, or
. Because of China’s scale, its unusual speed and pattern of development, its low labor costs and other unusual cultural or historic features, systems developed in Tokyo or Los Angeles usually need adjustment to work properly when they are applied in Tianjin or Shenzhen. Even when they don’t need any changes, leaders of Chinese organizations value the idea that systems have been changed to reflect Chinese characteristics. This is their version of what Americans have come to call “American exceptionalism.” In the case of the air-safety briefing teams, this meant, for instance, that FAA and Boeing officials would explain how they wrote safety manuals and regulatory codes, leaving it to the Chinese to apply those principles in their own circumstances.