China Airborne (3 page)

We got back to the airfield early. Against my own late-rising nature, I have come to respect the flying world’s emphasis on getting started as close as possible to first light. There are that many more hours of daylight to work with, and that much more leeway to wait out or plan around bad weather. If you’re worried about turbulence, wind, or thunderstorms, those problems are usually mildest early in the day. But Sunday morning passed, with no fuel. We were taken to the Broad Company’s huge employee cafeteria for lunch, where we sat among the hundreds of blue-uniformed workers and ate our rice and stir-fried pork with peppers off aluminum trays, with metal chopsticks. Back out to the airfield, where still no one knew about any gas. Claeys kept looking down at his watch and up at the sky. You never want to “have to” make a trip in a small plane, but he felt he
had to
get to Zhuhai by dawn. Two p.m. came and went. Three o’clock. Four. The November sun was getting low in the sky—though not as low as you would expect, given the season. Since the whole continental mass of China runs on Beijing Time, sunrise and sunset both come “late” in cities away from the east coast; it is as if everywhere from Boston to Seattle ran on East Coast time.

Five o’clock, still some remaining light—and the first sign of hope! A delivery truck rolled up toward our airplane, with a large metal barrel in the rear. “Avgas!” the head of the Aviation Department said, in Chinese. (
“Hang kong qi you!”
) Claeys asked him where it had come from. The story involved derelict ex-Soviet training planes that had been parked in a remote section of the airport. There was enough old gas left in their tanks to drain into the barrel. Claeys, who understood the description
in Chinese (as I did not), blanched. A little later he let me know what they had said.

At most airports, fuel comes out by way of a motor-driven pump, like at a gas station. At a few of the most remote, you might use a hand-cranked system to drive fuel through the hose and into the airplane’s gas tank. In this case, we had the barrel on the truck bed, a gas tank opening on top of each wing of the plane, and a ten-foot-long, inch-wide plastic hose with which to connect them. A luckless member of the Broad Corporation’s Aviation Department team began sucking fuel through the hose to siphon it from the barrel into the wing tanks.

At first he dreamed that he could start a flow going without getting gasoline all over his tongue and teeth. But each time he tried, yanking the hose from his mouth just before the gasoline reached his lips and jerking the hose toward the plane, the gas retreated back down the hose as soon as he stopped sucking. Not liking it a bit, and to the laughter of his fellow team members, he faced the fact that he would have to suck the gas along until it was spewing into his mouth—and then hand the hose to one of us to stick in the tank, while he began spitting and wiping off his tongue with a cloth. The Chinese term
chi ku
, “eat bitterness,” is shorthand for being tough, doing what it takes, bearing hardship. I imagined that in Changsha they might someday say
he you
, “drink gas,” for the same concept.

An hour of this—the flow got slower and slower as the level in the barrel went down—with ever-darkening skies, and we were ready to go. In pilot school, you’re taught to be hyperconscious of the quality of the fuel going into the gas tank. After all, it is what will keep you in the air and alive. Claeys and I rationalized that if the fuel was bad enough—who knows how long it had been in those Soviet-airplane tanks, or where else it might have been—the engine wouldn’t start at all. And if it was
good enough to get the plane through the engine start and the test runup, or trial revving of the propellers before takeoff, it would probably at least get us up to an altitude from which we could deploy the parachute if need be. This is not the way I had been taught to operate an airplane, and not what Claeys would have liked to do, but, I told myself, This is China. Meanwhile, Walter Wang was reading peacefully.

Into the plane; onto the runway; preparing for takeoff. Before the flight, Claeys had spent weeks getting the clearances he needed to operate a foreign-registered airplane, as a foreign citizen, through Chinese military airspace—which virtually all the airspace in China is. As we prepared for a southbound departure on the very long, military-scale runway, Claeys revved the engine repeatedly, to make sure that the gas was actually supporting combustion, and as a proxy for seeing that it would keep doing so once we took off.

The most dangerous time in a small-plane flight is the first thirty or forty seconds after the wheels leave the runway. If the engine fails then, because the fuel flow is obstructed or the engine hesitates when suddenly pushed to full power, you are in danger precisely because you’re so close to the ground. If the engine fails when an airplane is 10,000 feet up, that’s not good. But because airplanes are designed to glide down relatively slowly even without engine power, rather than plummeting like a rock, the higher an airplane is when the trouble starts, the more time the pilot has to decide what to do, and the wider the range of territory and possible landing sites the plane could reach in a glide. Even with its parachute, the Cirrus is in trouble if an engine fails before it gets at least 400 feet above the ground—there is just not enough time for the parachute to deploy fully and slow the descent. So Claeys tested and retested the engine; I kept my eye on the parachute handle, to use if we
got far enough into the air; Walter Wang settled into the backseat, and we went to the end of the runway to take off.

The engine came up smoothly; the plane reached an air speed of 70 knots, at which point Claeys began easing its nose upward; at about the same time as we got a safe distance off the runway, we disappeared into the brown blear of the standard big-city Chinese pollution shroud. And we were off.

In flying, the big distinction is in the clouds versus out of the clouds. When out of the clouds, you can see where you’re going and steer the plane as if it were a car—with the added ability to go up and down. When you’re in the clouds, everything about controlling the plane is different. It’s like driving a car while blindfolded, but worse. Assuming he’s not near a cliff, even a blindfolded driver can keep a car securely on the ground. In a plane it’s simply impossible to tell up from down by your own bodily senses, if you can’t
see
the ground or the horizon to assess whether the plane is turning, climbing, or holding a straight-and-level course. This is the hardest aspect of aeronautics to believe unless you have tried it.
¹
You control the plane by obsessively “scanning” the dashboard gauges, constantly comparing readings from one with the others, and taking advantage of their gyroscopes, which give an idea of where the horizon would be if you were able to see it.

Because of the clouds, and because it was night, and because it’s not possible in China just to fly around without the government’s approval as it is in much of the United States, from takeoff onward we were already operating under instrument flight rules, following controllers’ instructions about when to climb,
which direction to turn, and what waypoints to cross on our way south. This should have been fine, but it soon became more complicated than we had foreseen. Around the world, air-traffic controllers are supposed to be able to talk with pilots in English, in addition to their local language. If you listen to controllers’ discussions on the radio, you will hear a mixture of Spanish and English in Mexico, Korean and English in Korea, French and English in France, and an improbable English-only discourse most of the time in Japan, even though most of those speaking are clearly Japanese. (I ascribe this to a greater emphasis on doing things the “right” way in Japan than in many other places.) When traveling on an airline that lets passengers listen to air-traffic control, I would hear, at China’s main international airports—Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou—controllers talking rapid Mandarin to Chinese pilots and careful, accented, but clear English to Germans, Japanese, Americans, Turks, and other outsiders. But here in the interior of China, there would be no reason for controllers to keep up that competency. Claeys, skilled in Chinese, felt for procedure’s sake that as a foreign pilot he should speak English over the airwaves. But every exchange was halting—and I began to think that the controllers just wanted to forget that we were there.

Between Changsha and Zhuhai stood the mountains of southern Hunan. They are not tremendously high by world standards, but they were higher than our airplane was at its initial assigned altitude. And unless the controller gave us instructions to climb—as we would routinely expect a few minutes into the flight—we would be headed for trouble soon. Even for airliners, instrument flights usually take place in stages: first up to 3,000 feet, then 5,000 feet, then for the airliners well up into the “flight levels,” usually above 30,000 feet. Airliners fly that high precisely because the air is so thin. Within limits,
the higher it goes, the less wind resistance, or drag, an airplane has to force itself through, so the better fuel mileage it gets. It looked as if we needed to get to about 10,000 feet to go safely over the mountains—that was our guess from the charts, which themselves were in principle a military secret in China—but the controllers hadn’t told us to climb, and we couldn’t get their attention to pass along our increasingly urgent request.

On the GPS-based moving map in the cockpit, we saw the ridge draw closer. We couldn’t legally turn around, since that would be deviating from our clearance. Nor—again without breaking rules—could we decide to climb on our own. If we kept on straight and level, within ten minutes we’d crash. Then within eight minutes. Then six. Of course, we wouldn’t just keep on flying straight into the mountains. Around the world, pilots always have the option to “declare an emergency” and deviate from their assigned course and do whatever else they must to avoid disaster. But that is asking for trouble, even in places where flight is less carefully restricted than it is in China. I learned later that a military jet was trailing us through the flight. What might it have done if we suddenly made an unauthorized move? I was preparing a pitch to Claeys on the lines of: I know that as foreigners we are “supposed” to be speaking English to the controller, but you can speak perfectly good Chinese! Time to switch? Please?

All the chatter between pilots and controllers, anywhere in the world, is over open radio channels, as with truckers’ old CBs. The other pilots on the frequency, apparently all of them from airlines, could hear our increasingly tense-sounding attempts to get the controllers’ attention. Finally a Japan Airlines pilot who was capable in both English and Chinese (apart, I assume, from Japanese) broke in to ask us, in English, if we would like some help. He then relayed the request, in Chinese, to the controller.
Immediately the controller responded to him—partly because of the language but much more, I suspect, because talking with airline pilots seemed “normal”; we could well have been the first private pilots ever to come through his sector. The JAL pilot passed the word back to us, though we had heard it over the airwaves too. Permission to climb. One hurdle cleared.

On through the dark and clouds toward Zhuhai. Its airport is one of a large number studding the bay around Hong Kong harbor. Geographically, the closest U.S. equivalent would be the coast of Maine or Alaska, with rocky cliffs rising sharply from the bay. Economically and commercially, the equivalent would be the greater Los Angeles basin, with roads, lights, and buildings sprawling as far in all directions as one could see. As we descended (with controllers’ permission—they were more comfortable in English here so much closer to Hong Kong) in preparation for landing, we were mainly out of the clouds while still 2,000 feet above the ground. We marveled at the lights of the industrial urban expanse while noting the large, unlit masses that signified mountains and rocky islands. Zhuhai’s airport is on the far southern extension of a peninsula, the southernmost point in the Hong Kong area. The instrument approach required circling the hills and island peaks, which is safe enough as long as you can follow the radio-guidance beam all the way down to the airport.

As we came to the coast, the clouds thickened again, and we found ourselves in the middle of them when only 1,000 feet above the ground. Claeys had his eyes glued to the dials that showed how closely we were following the beam. If we drifted “one dot left” relative to the beam, he would nudge the plane toward the right; if we fell “one dot low” beneath the desired glide path, he would edge the plane up. I looked back and forth from those gauges to the window, waiting for the glimpse of
the ground or the airport approach lights that we needed before we reached our “decision height” a few hundred feet above the runway.

Suddenly the beam we were following, for an Instrument Landing System approach (or ILS, the most accurate system then in common use) seemed to behave strangely, and even flicker off. Momentarily there was no path to follow. This required immediate attention. We were close to the ground; we were headed down; we were among rocky peaks higher than our airplane was; and because of clouds and the dark we couldn’t see what was ahead.

With the rational parts of our brains, we knew—and had discussed during the preceding few minutes, in the “brief the approach” discussion that is supposed to be part of the preparation for every landing—how we should respond. Airplane life is based on backups and contingencies, and every pilot who has trained for an instrument rating has practiced the “missed approach” routine that is called for if you don’t see the ground or runway lights when you descend as low as the approach-chart says you safely and legally can. But it is one thing to know that in theory, and to have done it in practice time and again. It is something else to have to decide in real time while knowing that we were lower than the surrounding hills and only a few seconds’ flight time away from the hyper-busy airspace for Hong Kong.

The main backup plan in any situation like this is to climb immediately, since you cannot keep heading down when you don’t know what you might hit. If we climbed too much too suddenly, that could mean violating our clearance, and would bring us up into airspace where five large commercial airports had airline and air-cargo traffic merging—Hong Kong, Macau,
Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Zhuhai—with God knows what consequences. Of course we’d climb nonetheless; as the aviation saying went, it’s better to be around to argue about possible violations than to miss that disciplinary hearing because you have crashed. We could worry later on, too, about what had gone wrong. Had the landing signal failed or been switched off for some reason? Was it our instruments or their settings?