China Airborne

by James Fallows

  By 2010, when climate talks in Copenhagen were going nowhere, the aviation industry was long past the point of denial on emissions issues. Its European and U.S. leaders realized that for reasons of appearance, and because of impending legislation, and to forestall reaction from customers, they needed to act. They also had particular economic incentives. Fuel represents the largest single expense for airline companies. Each gallon they did not burn made their flights more profitable.

  What could they do about it? In China, the answers are routing, and algae.

  Detours and gas-guzzlers

  In the spring of 2011, my wife and I went with a young Chinese friend, River Lu, and a friend of hers to a concert by the Eagles in Beijing. The Eagles, as they say, are big in China and drew an enormous crowd of a wide range of ages to what in 2008 had been the Wukesong Olympic Basketball Arena and is now the MasterCard Center.

  The concert lasted three hours, with the crowd on its feet from the halfway point onward, once Don Henley began singing “Hotel California.” When it was all over, it took another few hours to travel what would have been at most a ten-mile straight shot from the arena back to our apartment. My wife and I had no car (or driver) in China and usually traveled by subway, but our friend wanted to show off her new Chinese-made Audi and had given us a ride. Apart from the jam in the parking lot, which had only two narrow exits for several thousand cars, our routing across town was the problem. Because of Beijing’s numerous one-way streets and freeway-like “ring road” layout, we had to circle far around the city before we could head back in the right direction. In addition to taking extra time, of course we used far more gas in those hours of idling and indirect routing than if our friend had been able to drive right down Chang’An Road.

  Those wasted hours were an analogue for why air travel in China has been exceptionally inefficient. The military’s control of the airspace around even the biggest commercial airports is the equivalent of having only a few narrow exits for a jammed parking lot. (That is, planes have to line up for chances to pass through the narrow military-authorized corridors.) And the military’s control of nearly all the airspace between Chinese destinations means that flights within China, even by the favored national carriers, fly indirect routes that are the equivalent of going all around the city on a ring road.

  These inefficiencies in air-traffic control are the main reason flights are more often delayed in China than in other major aviation countries; why their scheduled travel time, per mile flown, is much slower than in North America or Europe; and why they burn up to twice as much fuel per passenger mile as their counterparts in Europe or North America.

  Let me say that again: For reasons of sheer pointless inefficiency in routing, airlines in China are now burning twice as much fuel and emitting twice as much carbon as they would “have” to if they could fly more directly, with fewer delays. Or, put in terms that more closely match the planned expansion of Chinese aviation, commercial air travel in China could double, with no increase in emissions, if the air-traffic system worked the way it does in the rest of the world. The situation is similar to the burden created by China’s “legacy” building stock—the architectural remnants of the Mao era and the early reform years that were so cheaply built and poorly insulated that they take twice as much energy to heat and cool as their Western counterparts. Replacing all those old buildings with greener modern structures will take decades, and billions of dollars. Relatively speaking, wasteful airline routing could be corrected almost overnight.

  There is one more fuel penalty imposed by military control of the airspace. Modern airliners work more efficiently the higher they fly. With their high speed and great mass, they generate disproportionate drag if they fly through the relatively thick atmosphere below about 20,000 feet. More of their fuel goes simply to overcoming wind resistance. Everywhere else in the world, commercial jetliners spend their cruise time at 30,000 feet or above. In China, military restrictions sometimes keep jets at 10,000 or 15,000 feet for extended periods, where they become the equivalent of gas-guzzlers.

  Ending this sheer waste will require the cooperation of the Chinese military, but it will also be speeded up through a new technology for navigation based on a particular application of GPS guidance.

  GPS as fuel saver

  For cars, GPS simply means that we no longer have to get lost—even if people who know a neighborhood can often improve on the suggestions from the voice in the device. For air travel, GPS means a number of related improvements. An obvious one is more direct routing—cutting the corners off the indirect, jagged course marked by the older aviation guidance system called VOR,6 with consequent savings in time, fuel, and pollution.

  Another is reduction of the airport nuisance factor in big cities. The combination of very precise real-time GPS readings, which can locate even a fast-moving airliner within a space of a few feet, and sophisticated new computerized autopilots that can follow a very tightly defined path, now allows airplanes to fly exact slalom-style 3-D courses through the sky in a way that has never been conceivable before. With older VOR-based navigation, which prevailed around the world until the early 2000s, the “airways” that ran from one point to the next were eight to ten miles wide. That was the margin of error allowed planes on cross-country flights. Now the paths that airliners can fly—on departure, to avoid noise-sensitive areas of a big city, or on descent, to avoid hills and towers on the way to a remote or difficult landing site—have a margin of error of a wingspan or two, or a few hundred feet rather than tens of thousands.

  Why does this matter? Noise abatement for one, since the planes can more precisely follow paths that minimize neighborhood disruption. But the fuel savings are also significant. When the new path has been calculated to let the plane glide continuously down toward the runway, the final-approach stage of the flight requires only one-third as much fuel as the conventional method, which involves leveling off several times in a stair-step descent.

  These benefits apply anywhere, and airports in Western Europe and Australia have taken the lead in installing them. Typically for America’s general standing in the infrastructure races, American airports lag behind. But the revolution in aircraft guidance has one more implication that matters far more in China than in most other countries: It promises to bring China’s most remote (and politically sensitive) areas within feasible air reach of the rest of the country.

  The western half of China, from Xinjiang in the north to Tibet and Yunnan in the south, is very forbidding country for aviation. It includes some of the world’s remotest and most mountainous territory. This is dangerous to fly in for obvious reasons: peaks, violent storms, gusty winds. But there is also a less obvious reason. The navigational tools that have let aircraft find their way through bad weather and threatening terrain, and that have let controllers monitor their progress, have long depended on installations on the ground. Radar dishes to track airplanes themselves, radar-and-weather installations, “NavAids” like VOR stations—these all had to be built and maintained, and in a fairly dense network, to be of any use. It is no problem to have radar stations and navigational beacons dotted at intervals of a few dozen miles all across the East Coast of the United States—or of China as well. It is a major challenge amid the mountains and high plateaus of Tibet—and better transportation to Tibet and other western regions where ethnic Tibetans live has been a strategic priority for the central government, so as to bind those areas more tightly with the rest of China. And since both the radar beams and the ground-based navigation signals travel in straight lines, they can’t reach into the valleys between mountain ranges. Air-traffic controllers looking for airplanes, and pilots looking for navigation signals, are both effectively blind when a mountain sits between a radar site and the airplane.

  Much of western China has until recently been effectively beyond the range of reliable air travel. Navigation was so difficult that planes would often fly only in clear, calm weather—and the weather was very rarely clear
and calm. The coming of GPS offered the first prospect of guidance to remote areas without building a network of radar stations and beacons along the way. The more recent advent of the high-precision systems collectively known as required navigation performance (RNP) is almost as important, in allowing safe (and fuel-efficient) approaches, in any weather, to the most isolated and forbidding airports in the world.

  Direct flight to Tibet

  A small company named Naverus, based outside Seattle, is playing a major role in the opening of these western Chinese airports. This is another illustration of the underpublicized integration of safety and environmental efforts in the U.S. and Chinese aviation systems.

  In the 1990s, an Alaska Airlines captain named Steve Fulton worked with the FAA and with Alaska officials to design the first RNP approach in the world. It was for the Juneau airport, which is so closely hemmed by mountain ranges that it had been inaccessible in its frequent bad weather. Traditional navigational systems were not precise enough to keep airplanes clear of the mountains as they dropped down toward the runway. Since no roads connect Juneau with the rest of Alaska or North America, the frequent airport closures were a big problem. Fulton’s new RNP approach for Juneau, which plotted out a very precise set of waypoints for the airplane’s autopilot to follow as it wound its way through treacherous terrain, allowed safe descent through clouds and served as a proof-of-concept for making other “impossible” airports more accessible. Soon he and his team had applied thirty more RNP approaches for Alaskan airports.

  In 2003, with another Alaska Airlines captain, named Hal Andersen, and a high-tech entrepreneur named Dan Gerrity, Fulton founded Naverus to develop RNP approaches for other airports in difficult terrain. They won contracts in Brazil, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. But they were determined to make inroads in China, where aviation was growing faster than anyplace else, and where much of the planned airport expansion was in the harshest mountain settings.

  When I first met the Naverus people, in Beijing, in 2007, they had just completed one historic project and were preparing for another. The achievement just behind them was an approach to what was then one of the highest and most difficult airports anywhere on earth: Linzhi, in Tibet. Linzhi’s runway is at 9,700 feet of elevation, about the same as the highest airport in North America, the one in Leadville, Colorado. But Leadville is a tiny ex-mining settlement of perhaps two thousand people, while Linzhi is one of the major cities of the Tibetan plateau, with a population of perhaps two million. For three hundred days of the year it rains in Linzhi, and on the other sixty-five days the weather is rarely good enough for pilots to fly under Visual Flight Rules and find their way through the 18,000- to 20,000-foot escarpments alongside the narrow valley in which Linzhi sits.

  Lhasa is the next airport to the west, two hundred fifty miles away; Bangda, an even more remote Tibetan setting that has the highest-altitude commercial airport in the world, is about one hundred fifty miles to the east. Because the surrounding territory was so impossibly steep, only a few light airplanes had ever landed at Linzhi; no “transport aircraft”—airliners or cargo planes—had ever touched down on its runway. As with so many infrastructure projects in China, the big, new Linzhi airport with its broad runway had been built first, with practical questions about its feasibility coming second. “They just picked a location and built an airport there,” Steve Fulton told me in Beijing. “Only after that did the operational people look around to see whether anyone could actually fly there.”

  After Fulton and his team persuaded Chinese aviation officials to let them try an approach for Linzhi, he got his first in-person look at it. He flew to Lhasa and made the ten-hour drive eastward, through twisty mountain roads, to Linzhi. The airport itself proved to be beautiful and modern, with a long, well-paved runway. But the terminal was practically vacant. “They had their firetrucks, their Jetways—but no action,” he said. His next step was to use his own handheld GPS and begin making precise measurements of the location and elevation of significant areas around the airport. Foreigners are in theory forbidden to do this kind of mapping in China, because of holdover national-security concerns. Fulton explained that he had to make the measurements, because the official Chinese maps were so imprecise or wrong. “Through this process, I think the Chinese themselves began to see the importance of accurate terrain information,” Fulton said. “If it’s wrong, you crash.”

  By 2006, after eighteen months of work, the approach was drawn up, and the autopilots had done fine—in simulations. But no real airliner had flown the course in real circumstances. On July 12, 2006, Fulton joined a group of Chinese pilots and aviation officials crowded into the cockpit of an Air China 757 as it made a historic first test flight into Linzhi.

  The last six minutes of that approach are on video at the Naverus Web site,7 and they are riveting. The crew is talking in Chinese the whole time, but you can hear Fulton’s voice in the international language of aviation, English, calling out altitudes as they head down. Because this was a test flight, and no one had proven that the autopilots could keep them from running into a mountain in the clouds, they were required to conduct the flight under Visual Flight Rules conditions. Fulton had carefully arranged with the Air China crew about the circumstances under which they would break off the flight rather than risk disaster if it turned out that the mapping was wrong or the autopilots didn’t work.

  “As we turned each corner in the valley and went into each new segment of the approach, we kept being just under the clouds,” Fulton told me. Indeed, that is what the video shows—the cloud level coming down, and the plane descending just enough below it so that the pilots could still see ahead of them. “It was a kind of ballet down the river valley, with sweeping turns back and forth.” Then, at 200 feet above ground level—practically landing, from the layman’s point of view—the plane’s autopilots made an S-turn around a crag that sat between them and the runway. The plane automatically veered around the final obstacle, aligned itself with the runway, and touched down exactly on the center line. The fifteen people jammed in and around the cockpit—including brass from Air China and the CAAC—gave a round of applause. “Captain Jiang, the senior Air China pilot, turned to me and said, ‘I have full confidence in this technology!’ ” Fulton later told me. “We all knew that people from the minister on down would have been fired if we’d crashed.” To say nothing of the effect on those aboard.

  Instead, the CAAC vice minister proclaimed that “the future looks good for RNP technology in China.”8 Six weeks later, the first regular commercial airline flight ever to reach Linzhi touched down, guided through clouds and difficult weather along the RNP path. Naverus won contracts to develop several more approaches in China, starting with Bangda, which at 14,219 feet is the very highest airport in the world. Then for another Tibetan airport, Nagqu, which when it opens will be even higher. The business boomed so much that in late 2009 the Naverus company was acquired by GE and is now known as GE Aviation PBN Services. Boeing and Airbus now have their own subsidiaries working on RNP approaches. There is a race to cover China with these new navigation systems that will make travel to remote areas safer, more reliable, and also more fuel efficient.

  “The point is that they can navigate to any airport in the world with absolutely nothing on the ground,” Sergio von Borries, a pilot from Brazil who had become another Naverus official, told me at a conference in China. “These truly are the highways in the sky, and we are the highway engineers.”

  China as the world’s biofuels lab

  The other potential solution to the pollution problem was hard for me to take at face value, but eventually I became semi-convinced. It is shifting to algae as a major future source of jet fuel.

  China’s great advantage in many fields is that it is the place where so much of the world’s doing now occurs. In the effort to develop lower-carbon sources of aviation fuel, China has become the locus for efforts by Boeing and others to extract fuel more efficiently
from biological sources. The concept here is not a mystery. Algae, like some more complex plants, produce hydrocarbons that can be converted to a form of oil. (Many algae produce a kind of waxy paraffin with a high oil content. Normal fossil-fuel deposits are only rarely the remains of dinosaurs; much more frequently, they come from ancient fossilized algae beds.) The trick is growing algae and harvesting its oil at a large enough scale and a low enough cost to be a plausible substitute for regular petroleum. Projects toward that end are under way around the world. Most within the United States have been sponsored and subsidized by the Pentagon, which has viewed its reliance on imported petroleum as a serious security risk. Within China, the major effort is, yet again, jointly led by Boeing and the Chinese government.

  Al Bryant, a career Boeing engineer and manager, moved to Beijing shortly after the Olympics to oversee Boeing’s research-and-development efforts within China. He became famous within aviation circles for his role as a traveling proselytizer for the importance of biofuels in general and algae in particular. His presentation centers on a graph that projects likely emissions from airline travel through the year 2050. This chart has been the premise for Boeing’s argument that it is time for an all-out effort for practical biofuels, especially from algae. The presentation’s main feature was a chart showing that the hoped-for carbon improvements from biofuels would not simply keep the aviation industry from grossly increasing CO2 emissions as traffic goes up but actually reduce them below their 2009 levels.