3 * The Men from Boeing
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.
E. E. Bauer and the early days
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 becomes “half Chinese”
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.
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.
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.
Rule of man and rule of law
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.9 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.
“Early on, some Chinese people pulled me aside and said, ‘We’re not really sure this will ever work in China,’ ” Joe T said to me, ten years after he began the project. “They were worried about losing face, disrupting the culture of ‘human relationships.’ ” One of his crucial allies was a pilot named Rao Xiaowu, who had flown MD-11s for China Eastern Airlines and gone on to become a senior flight-standards official at the CAAC. (The MD-11 was an even larger version of the familiar DC-10, an airplane with one engine under each wing and a third in the vertical stabilizer, just above the tail.) Rao had experience overseas and understood how profoundly Chinese airlines had to change if they hoped to reach international standards. The second champion was another pilot, Yang Yuanyuan,10 who had joined the PLA at age sixteen during the Cultural Revolution, graduated from flight school at age nineteen, and joined China Southern Airlines, for which he eventually became chief pilot. In the late 1990s, as the cooperative Chinese-U.S. safety efforts were beginning, Yang had gone to CAAC as head of flight standards.
“Yang and Rao made clear that they really did expect this to work,” Joe T said. “They went to meetings and told people at all the airlines, ‘We want you to pay attention, because we want a system that is run to international standards.’ They told their colleagues, ‘If we stick to regulation by “human relations,” we’re going to keep having dead people. It has to be run the international way.’ ” Yang had the authority at CAAC to place key allies in the airlines’ safety department, which he used. “The Chinese have a term, ‘air-drop soldier,’ for someone who is dropped in because of high-level connections but doesn’t know what to do,” Joe T said. “Yang did just the opposite, making sure he had the right people in these roles.”
Neither the Chinese nor the U.S. government had a big budget for the training efforts, so Boeing continued underwriting much of the cost. United Airlines helped as well. In Seattle, visiting teams of Chinese regulators and check pilots watched Boeing train pilots in its simulators. In a special demonstration at United’s simulator center in Denver, they watched a pilot mimic the mistakes and rash judgments of an incompetent airman—mainly to observe how the United check pilot handled the situation and corrected his errors.
“Those exchanges started in 1997, and they have never stopped,” Joe T told me in Beijing in 2011. It was the beginning of the underpublicized but thoroughgoing near-integration of the U.S. and Chinese aviation establishments in safety measures. In 1999, Yang Yuanyuan became vice minister of the CAAC. Three years later, he became minister, and thus the single most influential person in China’s aerospace establishment. Did their efforts make any difference? Through the next decade, Chinese commercial aviation, while expanding faster than any other country’s, was statistically among the world’s very safest. And it prepared for the surprising next transition the government authorities had in mind.