正文
整个九十年代，中国的航空公司可能是世界上最危险的航空公司了：飞行员错误，不可靠的维护，政府不利的监控。几年内飞行事故死了５５０人，威胁到了国家经济的增长。
今天，中国在航空飞行安全上却处于全球领先地位。在她的航空公司的飞行时间保持两位数增长的同时，中国航空公司的事故率确比美国和欧洲还要低。
How China Turned Around A Dismal Air-Safety Record
Foreign Help Combined With Willful Regulator; FAA Chief\'s Hairy Ride
The Wall Street Journal 10/10/2007
Author: Andy Pasztor
(Copyright (c) 2007, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
For much of the 1990s, Chinese airlines were arguably the world\'s most dangerous, beset by persistent pilot errors, unreliable maintenance and erratic government oversight. With crashes at one point taking 550 lives over several years, the issue threatened to impede the nation\'s economic growth.
Today, China is an acclaimed global leader in air safety. Despite frequent double-digit annual growth in the number of hours its airlines fly, their most recent fatal-accident rates are lower than America\'s and Europe\'s.
The transformation from worst to first reflects how the Chinese government has proved able, with significant foreign help, to overhaul a sprawling industry whose safety record was tarnishing the country\'s image, taking advantage of foreign assistance and insisting on compliance by Chinese companies. The turnabout came under the auspices of a hard-charging aviation official appointed after a string of crashes stretching from the mid-1990s to 2002, Yang Yuanyuan. China learned a profound lesson by slowing down its breakneck aviation growth, Mr. Yang said in an email interview, and made it a point to adopt a more open attitude and learn from foreign accidents and incidents.
\'A Long Way to Go\'
Although he says we still have a long way to go before fully reaching Western safety standards, the lessons of the aviation case appear relevant to China\'s latest safety crisis -- that involving exports such as lead-painted toys and tainted seafood, drugs, pet food and toothpaste.
The challenges are quite similar...requiring a way to balance safety and growth, says Ma Tao, China\'s representative to the International Civil Aviation Organization. You must have a very strong, central agency to establish rules, plus well-trained people able to adapt and impose them in the Chinese environment. In the tainted-export matter, the government has publicly acknowledged systemic failures and named a trusted insider to spearhead reforms and enforce compliance.
In aviation, showing how far China has come, U.S. regulators now visit the country to see applications of sophisticated satellite-based navigation aids and learn how the U.S. could use them with particularly tricky or remote fields currently unavailable in bad weather.
This summer, Federal Aviation Administration chief Marion Blakey accompanied Mr. Yang on a demonstration flight to an isolated, difficult-to-approach mountain airport. Perched at 11,000 feet amid jagged peaks and spectacular waterfalls with great tourism promise, the JiuZhaiGou airport in western China has an approach that winds through a series of mountain valleys.
On their final approach, Ms. Blakey recalls, a sudden gust rocked their twin-engine Boeing 757. Off the left wing, the U.S. delegation saw lightning ricochet off menacing clouds and swirling rain. The pilots aborted the landing, climbed steeply and then circled to touch down safely from the opposite direction.
Throughout the turbulent ride, Mr. Yang appeared anxious to grab the controls. A veteran airline pilot, he often does double duty as captain of the jumbo jet that carries China\'s president on foreign trips. After their arrival, according to Ms. Blakey, Mr. Yang said he didn\'t take the controls because his agency had mandated that only a few pilots with special training were allowed to land at such difficult strips.
Such rigorous safety compliance is a far cry from the blunders of the 1990s, before Triple Y, as admirers inside the FAA call Yang Yuanyuan, took over. In nearly a dozen deadly accidents then, planes crashed after pilots flouted basic rules, such as by flying into violent storms and haphazardly programming autopilots. Then in June 1994, a China Northwest Airlines plane went down a few minutes after takeoff from the resort spot of Xian, killing all 160 aboard. Authorities at first blamed an engine explosion, but six months later, they charged five mechanics with improperly repairing and re-connecting a part of the autopilot system, in a way that would have made the plane nearly impossible to control.
By then, China had dismissed its chief airline regulator. Days before the Xian crash, his successor approved disclosure of scores of near-accidents that indicated chronic hazards. The incidents included pilots shutting down engines in mid-flight, scraping wingtips on the ground during landings and running planes off the ends of runways.
Warning Flags
Although the Xian crash involved a Russian-built Tupolev with a spotty maintenance record, warning flags quickly popped up in Washington and at Boeing Co., where executives worried that a drumbeat of Chinese accidents could hurt sales. Barely a week later, Boeing began offering free safety-management courses for hundreds of Chinese controllers and airline flight-operations personnel, and began temporarily offering Chinese pilots free time on flight simulators. Later, Boeing and European rival Airbus set up permanent pilot training programs in China, which also welcomed a small army of foreign experts to train mechanics.
With the help of Boeing and later the FAA, China rewrote its aviation regulations. Chinese officials knew the FAA was revving up its own safety assessments of foreign carriers. Beijing was eager to avoid friction that could mean a further public-relations hit or, worse, prompt U.S. initiatives to restrict Chinese flights to the U.S.
Chet Ekstrand, a senior Boeing safety expert who worked on the regulations project, recalls delicate tradeoffs between advocating solutions and giving the Chinese time to weigh alternatives and reach their own conclusions. We would never hand them a document and say, point blank, this is the plan for improving aviation safety, Mr. Ekstrand says. He marvels at how the Chinese could be so candid in revealing shortcomings to outsiders.
At crucial junctures, officials at the Chinese aviation authority did something akin to heresy for a burgeoning economic superpower: They threatened to halt deliveries of new aircraft to China\'s airlines until a comprehensive, multiyear safety roadmap was in place and they were confident that airline officials were taking it seriously.
Still, pilot slipups continued to lead to horrific crashes. On April 15, 2002, an Air China Boeing 767 widebody slammed into a hillside near Busan, South Korea, in poor visibility and gusty winds. The crash killed 129 and injured 37 others. Investigators found the pilots had failed to prepare properly for the approach and didn\'t slow enough as the plane circled to land in unfamiliar, treacherous terrain.
Compounded Mistakes
The mistakes, bad enough by themselves, were compounded when the captain chose to continue the descent even though he was disoriented and had lost sight of the runway. The crash probe said the first officer, with only two previous flights as a 767 copilot, was too focused on the weather and failed to warn the pilot early enough to abort.
The Air China calamity was followed just a few weeks later by a 112-fatality China Northern crash off the northern port city of Dalian. Officials ultimately blamed the MD-82 accident on arson by a passenger who had taken out multiple life-insurance policies. Nevertheless, it led to calls for a housecleaning at the Civil Aviation Administration of China, or CAAC. Deputy Director Mr. Yang, though considered young for a top job at 51, enjoyed good relationships with U.S. industry leaders. The Communist leadership put him in charge, with a clear message: Demonstrate China\'s ability to meet world safety standards or there\'ll be another shakeup.
Moving quickly, the agency temporarily banned domestic flights by Chinese carriers after midnight. It ordered more-stringent inspection of passengers, including their clothes and shoes. Down the road, Mr. Yang negotiated a cooperation agreement with the U.S. to coordinate FAA and industry assistance.
More than two dozen U.S. companies, from engine makers to cockpit-instrument suppliers, banded together to provide technical help. FAA officials helped the Chinese beef up air-traffic control designs and inspection procedures.
Chinese airline officials, regulators and air-traffic-control managers were targeted for an exchange program focused on skills such as strategic planning and project oversight. In the continuing program, candidates spend three months in the U.S. including stints with major airlines and aircraft manufacturers. Airbus and French aviation colleges have separate agreements to train Chinese safety managers.
Under Mr. Yang, the Chinese aviation authority has been relatively open about twin dangers: complacency and unchecked growth. With China\'s aviation system expanding at an extraordinary pace, Mr. Yang has restricted formation of additional airlines and speaks out when a jetliner crashes anywhere in the world, exhorting Chinese industry leaders and regulators to reexamine their own safety agendas. He has warned that those failing to meet requirements will be forced out of the market.
When Chinese carriers began flying a new generation of smaller regional jets, they faced a fresh set of safety issues. In November 2004, a Bombardier CRJ-200 plunged into an ice-covered Mongolian lake seconds after taking off in good weather, killing 54. Mr. Yang let U.S. and other foreign investigators visit the site within hours. Investigators later pegged the likely cause as wing ice stemming from failure by the crew to take necessary precautions.
Prompted partly by that crash, China and the International Air Transport Association, which represents the interests of airlines, worked out a separate cooperation pact. China became a pioneer in allowing IATA specialists to audit all airlines and in due course release their findings.
The combination of top-down mandates, aggressive enforcement and expert advice yielded results. China has many undeveloped airports, limited air-traffic control capabilities over vast territory and chronic pilot shortages. Yet Boeing calculates that the overall accident rate for Chinese carriers has improved roughly tenfold since the mid-1990s. It is a remarkable statistic, considering that fatality rates moved in the opposite direction among airlines in Africa and parts of the former Soviet Union during the same time.
No Chinese jetliner has crashed since the 2004 Batou tragedy, even though China\'s aviation is growing so fast that its airlines have flown more than 8.5 million hours since then. Statistically, that amounts to the best safety performance in the world in the past three years.
China has emerged as the envy of developing countries struggling with too many planes, too few pilots and inadequate airports. The FAA wants to use the CAAC model to help India expand its aviation safely. According to the FAA\'s Ms. Blakey, Chinese authorities early on recognized there simply was no place for secrets when it came to aviation safety. They never let egos get in the way.
With a near-doubling expected in the number of both planes and passengers in China by early next decade, Mr. Yang is now directing an ambitious effort to redesign airways and airport approaches. The goal is to give Chinese as well as foreign carriers more options to fly routes that save fuel, skirt storms and avoid congestion. If the modifications pan out, passengers could save up to two hours on a typical flight from Tokyo to Beijing. Starting this year, vertical separation between aircraft cruising near each other in Chinese airspace will be slashed in half to 1,000 feet, already the standard in developed regions.
China\'s most pressing safety issue may be human capital. With the country requiring nearly 9,000 new pilots over the next few years and domestic training able to satisfy only a portion of that need, China is encouraging female applicants, looking to increase the mandatory retirement age and turning to fast-track training programs abroad that focus more on simulator time than actual flying. But Mr. Ma, China\'s representative to the International Civil Aviation Organization, sees a potential danger because he says current graduates already are very inexperienced [and] they need more training.
Yet regulators are giving higher priority to safety imperatives. The CAAC previously increased, rather than reduced, minimum experience levels before new pilots can fly passengers or be promoted to captain. Mr. Ma says officials are considering mandating additional simulator time for fledgling pilots, and possibly requiring trainees to serve longer periods as cockpit observers before letting them get behind the controls with passengers in the back.
今天，中国在航空飞行安全上却处于全球领先地位。在她的航空公司的飞行时间保持两位数增长的同时，中国航空公司的事故率确比美国和欧洲还要低。
How China Turned Around A Dismal Air-Safety Record
Foreign Help Combined With Willful Regulator; FAA Chief\'s Hairy Ride
The Wall Street Journal 10/10/2007
Author: Andy Pasztor
(Copyright (c) 2007, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
For much of the 1990s, Chinese airlines were arguably the world\'s most dangerous, beset by persistent pilot errors, unreliable maintenance and erratic government oversight. With crashes at one point taking 550 lives over several years, the issue threatened to impede the nation\'s economic growth.
Today, China is an acclaimed global leader in air safety. Despite frequent double-digit annual growth in the number of hours its airlines fly, their most recent fatal-accident rates are lower than America\'s and Europe\'s.
The transformation from worst to first reflects how the Chinese government has proved able, with significant foreign help, to overhaul a sprawling industry whose safety record was tarnishing the country\'s image, taking advantage of foreign assistance and insisting on compliance by Chinese companies. The turnabout came under the auspices of a hard-charging aviation official appointed after a string of crashes stretching from the mid-1990s to 2002, Yang Yuanyuan. China learned a profound lesson by slowing down its breakneck aviation growth, Mr. Yang said in an email interview, and made it a point to adopt a more open attitude and learn from foreign accidents and incidents.
\'A Long Way to Go\'
Although he says we still have a long way to go before fully reaching Western safety standards, the lessons of the aviation case appear relevant to China\'s latest safety crisis -- that involving exports such as lead-painted toys and tainted seafood, drugs, pet food and toothpaste.
The challenges are quite similar...requiring a way to balance safety and growth, says Ma Tao, China\'s representative to the International Civil Aviation Organization. You must have a very strong, central agency to establish rules, plus well-trained people able to adapt and impose them in the Chinese environment. In the tainted-export matter, the government has publicly acknowledged systemic failures and named a trusted insider to spearhead reforms and enforce compliance.
In aviation, showing how far China has come, U.S. regulators now visit the country to see applications of sophisticated satellite-based navigation aids and learn how the U.S. could use them with particularly tricky or remote fields currently unavailable in bad weather.
This summer, Federal Aviation Administration chief Marion Blakey accompanied Mr. Yang on a demonstration flight to an isolated, difficult-to-approach mountain airport. Perched at 11,000 feet amid jagged peaks and spectacular waterfalls with great tourism promise, the JiuZhaiGou airport in western China has an approach that winds through a series of mountain valleys.
On their final approach, Ms. Blakey recalls, a sudden gust rocked their twin-engine Boeing 757. Off the left wing, the U.S. delegation saw lightning ricochet off menacing clouds and swirling rain. The pilots aborted the landing, climbed steeply and then circled to touch down safely from the opposite direction.
Throughout the turbulent ride, Mr. Yang appeared anxious to grab the controls. A veteran airline pilot, he often does double duty as captain of the jumbo jet that carries China\'s president on foreign trips. After their arrival, according to Ms. Blakey, Mr. Yang said he didn\'t take the controls because his agency had mandated that only a few pilots with special training were allowed to land at such difficult strips.
Such rigorous safety compliance is a far cry from the blunders of the 1990s, before Triple Y, as admirers inside the FAA call Yang Yuanyuan, took over. In nearly a dozen deadly accidents then, planes crashed after pilots flouted basic rules, such as by flying into violent storms and haphazardly programming autopilots. Then in June 1994, a China Northwest Airlines plane went down a few minutes after takeoff from the resort spot of Xian, killing all 160 aboard. Authorities at first blamed an engine explosion, but six months later, they charged five mechanics with improperly repairing and re-connecting a part of the autopilot system, in a way that would have made the plane nearly impossible to control.
By then, China had dismissed its chief airline regulator. Days before the Xian crash, his successor approved disclosure of scores of near-accidents that indicated chronic hazards. The incidents included pilots shutting down engines in mid-flight, scraping wingtips on the ground during landings and running planes off the ends of runways.
Warning Flags
Although the Xian crash involved a Russian-built Tupolev with a spotty maintenance record, warning flags quickly popped up in Washington and at Boeing Co., where executives worried that a drumbeat of Chinese accidents could hurt sales. Barely a week later, Boeing began offering free safety-management courses for hundreds of Chinese controllers and airline flight-operations personnel, and began temporarily offering Chinese pilots free time on flight simulators. Later, Boeing and European rival Airbus set up permanent pilot training programs in China, which also welcomed a small army of foreign experts to train mechanics.
With the help of Boeing and later the FAA, China rewrote its aviation regulations. Chinese officials knew the FAA was revving up its own safety assessments of foreign carriers. Beijing was eager to avoid friction that could mean a further public-relations hit or, worse, prompt U.S. initiatives to restrict Chinese flights to the U.S.
Chet Ekstrand, a senior Boeing safety expert who worked on the regulations project, recalls delicate tradeoffs between advocating solutions and giving the Chinese time to weigh alternatives and reach their own conclusions. We would never hand them a document and say, point blank, this is the plan for improving aviation safety, Mr. Ekstrand says. He marvels at how the Chinese could be so candid in revealing shortcomings to outsiders.
At crucial junctures, officials at the Chinese aviation authority did something akin to heresy for a burgeoning economic superpower: They threatened to halt deliveries of new aircraft to China\'s airlines until a comprehensive, multiyear safety roadmap was in place and they were confident that airline officials were taking it seriously.
Still, pilot slipups continued to lead to horrific crashes. On April 15, 2002, an Air China Boeing 767 widebody slammed into a hillside near Busan, South Korea, in poor visibility and gusty winds. The crash killed 129 and injured 37 others. Investigators found the pilots had failed to prepare properly for the approach and didn\'t slow enough as the plane circled to land in unfamiliar, treacherous terrain.
Compounded Mistakes
The mistakes, bad enough by themselves, were compounded when the captain chose to continue the descent even though he was disoriented and had lost sight of the runway. The crash probe said the first officer, with only two previous flights as a 767 copilot, was too focused on the weather and failed to warn the pilot early enough to abort.
The Air China calamity was followed just a few weeks later by a 112-fatality China Northern crash off the northern port city of Dalian. Officials ultimately blamed the MD-82 accident on arson by a passenger who had taken out multiple life-insurance policies. Nevertheless, it led to calls for a housecleaning at the Civil Aviation Administration of China, or CAAC. Deputy Director Mr. Yang, though considered young for a top job at 51, enjoyed good relationships with U.S. industry leaders. The Communist leadership put him in charge, with a clear message: Demonstrate China\'s ability to meet world safety standards or there\'ll be another shakeup.
Moving quickly, the agency temporarily banned domestic flights by Chinese carriers after midnight. It ordered more-stringent inspection of passengers, including their clothes and shoes. Down the road, Mr. Yang negotiated a cooperation agreement with the U.S. to coordinate FAA and industry assistance.
More than two dozen U.S. companies, from engine makers to cockpit-instrument suppliers, banded together to provide technical help. FAA officials helped the Chinese beef up air-traffic control designs and inspection procedures.
Chinese airline officials, regulators and air-traffic-control managers were targeted for an exchange program focused on skills such as strategic planning and project oversight. In the continuing program, candidates spend three months in the U.S. including stints with major airlines and aircraft manufacturers. Airbus and French aviation colleges have separate agreements to train Chinese safety managers.
Under Mr. Yang, the Chinese aviation authority has been relatively open about twin dangers: complacency and unchecked growth. With China\'s aviation system expanding at an extraordinary pace, Mr. Yang has restricted formation of additional airlines and speaks out when a jetliner crashes anywhere in the world, exhorting Chinese industry leaders and regulators to reexamine their own safety agendas. He has warned that those failing to meet requirements will be forced out of the market.
When Chinese carriers began flying a new generation of smaller regional jets, they faced a fresh set of safety issues. In November 2004, a Bombardier CRJ-200 plunged into an ice-covered Mongolian lake seconds after taking off in good weather, killing 54. Mr. Yang let U.S. and other foreign investigators visit the site within hours. Investigators later pegged the likely cause as wing ice stemming from failure by the crew to take necessary precautions.
Prompted partly by that crash, China and the International Air Transport Association, which represents the interests of airlines, worked out a separate cooperation pact. China became a pioneer in allowing IATA specialists to audit all airlines and in due course release their findings.
The combination of top-down mandates, aggressive enforcement and expert advice yielded results. China has many undeveloped airports, limited air-traffic control capabilities over vast territory and chronic pilot shortages. Yet Boeing calculates that the overall accident rate for Chinese carriers has improved roughly tenfold since the mid-1990s. It is a remarkable statistic, considering that fatality rates moved in the opposite direction among airlines in Africa and parts of the former Soviet Union during the same time.
No Chinese jetliner has crashed since the 2004 Batou tragedy, even though China\'s aviation is growing so fast that its airlines have flown more than 8.5 million hours since then. Statistically, that amounts to the best safety performance in the world in the past three years.
China has emerged as the envy of developing countries struggling with too many planes, too few pilots and inadequate airports. The FAA wants to use the CAAC model to help India expand its aviation safely. According to the FAA\'s Ms. Blakey, Chinese authorities early on recognized there simply was no place for secrets when it came to aviation safety. They never let egos get in the way.
With a near-doubling expected in the number of both planes and passengers in China by early next decade, Mr. Yang is now directing an ambitious effort to redesign airways and airport approaches. The goal is to give Chinese as well as foreign carriers more options to fly routes that save fuel, skirt storms and avoid congestion. If the modifications pan out, passengers could save up to two hours on a typical flight from Tokyo to Beijing. Starting this year, vertical separation between aircraft cruising near each other in Chinese airspace will be slashed in half to 1,000 feet, already the standard in developed regions.
China\'s most pressing safety issue may be human capital. With the country requiring nearly 9,000 new pilots over the next few years and domestic training able to satisfy only a portion of that need, China is encouraging female applicants, looking to increase the mandatory retirement age and turning to fast-track training programs abroad that focus more on simulator time than actual flying. But Mr. Ma, China\'s representative to the International Civil Aviation Organization, sees a potential danger because he says current graduates already are very inexperienced [and] they need more training.
Yet regulators are giving higher priority to safety imperatives. The CAAC previously increased, rather than reduced, minimum experience levels before new pilots can fly passengers or be promoted to captain. Mr. Ma says officials are considering mandating additional simulator time for fledgling pilots, and possibly requiring trainees to serve longer periods as cockpit observers before letting them get behind the controls with passengers in the back.
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