China Airborne (eBook)

James Fallows (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2012 | 1. Auflage
288 Seiten
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (Verlag)
978-0-307-90740-0 (ISBN)

Infos

More than two-thirds of the new airports under construction today are being built in China. Chinese airlines expect to triple their fleet size over the next decade and will account for the fastest-growing market for Boeing and Airbus. But the Chinese are determined to be more than customers. In 2011, China announced its Twelfth Five-Year Plan, which included the commitment to spend a quarter of a trillion dollars to jump-start its aerospace industry. Its goal is to produce the Boeings and Airbuses of the future. Toward that end, it acquired two American companies: Cirrus Aviation, maker of the world's most popular small propeller plane, and Teledyne Continental, which produces the engines for Cirrus and other small aircraft.

In China Airborne, James Fallows documents, for the first time, the extraordinary scale of this project and explains why it is a crucial test case for China's hopes for modernization and innovation in other industries. He makes clear how it stands to catalyze the nation's hyper-growth and hyper- urbanization, revolutionizing China in ways analogous to the building of America's transcontinental railroad in the nineteenth century. Fallows chronicles life in the city of Xi'an, home to more than 250,000 aerospace engineers and assembly workers, and introduces us to some of the hucksters, visionaries, entrepreneurs, and dreamers who seek to benefit from China's pursuit of aerospace supremacy. He concludes by examining what this latest demonstration of Chinese ambition means for the United States and the rest of the world--and the right ways to understand it.

Textauszug

The flight to Zhuhai

In the fall of 2006, not long after I arrived in China, I was the copilot on a small-airplane journey from Changsha, the capital of Hunan province near the center of the country, to Zhuhai, a tropical settlement on the far southern coast just west of Hong Kong.

The plane was a sleek-looking, four-seat, propeller-driven model called the Cirrus SR22, manufactured by a then wildly successful start-up company in Duluth, Minnesota, called Cirrus Design. Through the previous five years, the SR22 had been a worldwide commercial and technological phenomenon, displacing familiar names like Cessna and Piper to become the best-selling small airplane of its type anywhere. Part of its appeal was its built-in &ldquo,ballistic parachute,&rdquo, a unique safety device capable of lowering the entire airplane safely to the ground in case of disaster. The first successful &ldquo,save&rdquo, by this system in a Cirrus occurred in the fall of 2002, when a pilot took off from a small airport near Dallas in a Cirrus that had just been in for maintenance. A few minutes after takeoff, an aileron flopped loosely from one of the wings, investigators later determined that it had not been correctly reattached after maintenance. This made the plane impossible to control and in other circumstances would probably have led to a fatal crash. Instead the pilot pulled the handle to deploy the parachute, came down near a golf-course fairway, and walked away unharmed. The plane itself was repaired and later flown around the country by Cirrus as a promotional device for its safety systems.

On the tarmac in Changsha, on a Sunday evening as darkness fell, I sat in the Cirrus&rsquo,s right-hand front seat, traditionally the place for the copilot&mdash,or the flight instructor, during training flights. In the left-hand seat, usually the place for the pilot-in-command, sat Peter Claeys, a Belgian citizen and linguistic whiz whose job, from his sales base in Shanghai, was to persuade newly flush Chinese business tycoons that they should spend half a million U.S. dollars or more to buy a Cirrus plane of their own&mdash,even though there was as yet virtually no place in China where they would be allowed to fly it. I was there as a friend of Claeys&rsquo,s and because I was practically the only other person within a thousand miles who had experience as a pilot of the Cirrus. In one of the backseats was Walter Wang, a Chinese business journalist who, even more than Claeys and me, was happily innocent of the risks we were about to take.

We were headed to Zhuhai because every two years, in November, the vast military-scale runway and ramp areas of Zhuhai&rsquo,s Sanzao Airport become crammed with aircraft large and small that have flown in from around the world for the Zhuhai International Air Show, an Asian equivalent of the Paris Air Show. Zhuhai&rsquo,s main runway, commissioned by grand-thinking local officials without the blessing of the central government in Beijing, is more than 13,000 feet long&mdash,longer than any at Heathrow or LAX. The rest of the facilities are on a similar scale, and during most of the year sit practically vacant. As long-term punishment by the Beijing authorities for the local government&rsquo,s ambitious overreach, the airport has been (as a local manager told me ruefully on a visit in 2011) &ldquo,kept out of the aviation economy&rdquo, that has brought booms to the surrounding airports in Hong Kong, Macau, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou.

But briefly every two years, every bit of its space is called into play. So many planes are present there&rsquo,s barely room to maneuver. Because nearly all of the twenty-first century&rsquo,s growth...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.5.2012
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte
• Themenwelt: Technik
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Unternehmensführung / Management
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Volkswirtschaftslehre ► Makroökonomie
• ISBN-10: 0-307-90740-6 / 0307907406
• ISBN-13: 978-0-307-90740-0 / 9780307907400