China's Air Wants to Kill You (and I don't mean the pollution)

I have lived in China for five of the last six years, and four of those years have been in Beijing (and God, just seeing that sentence in print makes me groan). In that time, I have logged more than 24,000 miles of flight on Chinese airlines, usually flying either into or out of PEK (Capital International Airport, Beijing). I will just say from the outset that anything to do with flying in China is always a miserable experience, from my flight into Beijing last November 5 (Xiamen Air MF 8105) where a fistfight broke out in flight between a pair of drunken idiots, to an Air Macau flight to Taiwan by way of Macau (which is in the opposite direction, but Beijing refuses to fly directly to Taiwan because of the CPC's petulant insistence on pretending Taiwan does not exist (Taylor, Asia Times)) in April 2015 which had to sit on the tarmac for six hours prior to take-off because a Party Member with a ticket for that flight was stuck in traffic on Yaojiayuan Road. Airline staff in China have always seemed to be on a sacred mission to surpass the already-impressive level of incompetence displayed by the rest of the country.
And this summer, if the number of in-flight mishaps, crashes and near-crashes is any indication, they have redoubled their efforts.

Runway-Schmunway! I'm Chinese! I'll Land Wherever I Want To!

To begin with, let me hit the one that made news in multiple countries (and which, on a personal note, was eerie for me to read about because it happens to be the second leg of my usual itinerary when flying from Beijing to Manila by way of Xiamen to see my family... thank God I was already in the Philippines when the incident happened). Xiamen Air's MF8667, which skidded off the runway at Ninoy Aquino International Airport on 17 August after a landing that was described as "bumpy (Staff, Channel News Asia, "Xiamen Airlines Plane")." One report says that the plane "bounced" on its way down the runway (South China Morning Post, "Chinese Passenger Plane"). The airport general manager said it was the plane's second attempt at landing (Channel News Asia, "Xiamen Air Passenger Jet"), and one admittedly questionable source (jqknews) posted an article in broken English that claimed NAIA's tower tried to call the pilot multiple times and got no response
What all the reports agree on is that the pilot made a reckless landing and went off the runway, shearing off one of the engines and endangering 165 passengers in the process. The Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines barred the hot-dogging pilot from leaving the country pending an investigation (ABS-CBN News) and the Philippine Government has fined Xiamen Air (a subsidiary of China Southern) 33 million Philippine Pesos ($613,486.50 US) for the mishap (Romero, Philippine Star), a figure which the snivelling Chinese airline is currently trying to widdle away at (Cepeda, Rappler).
As it stands at the time of this publication, the black box has been decoded (but not released), the pilot and first officer have both flown home to China (presumably as passengers), and two separate divisions of the CAAP are completing investigations into the incident, one to determine if safety regulations need to be amended and another to lay down the law on Xiamen Air (Rappler, "Recordings of Xiamen").
One would think that was enough embarassment for China's air-travel industry for a while, but apparently for China, enough is never enough.

Wheels? Where We're Going We Don't Need... Wheels.

On 28 August, not even 2 weeks after the Xiamen Air debacle, Capital Airlines, a budget airline in China (because, you know, the flagship airlines like some of the others that will be mentioned in this article are too safe, right?) owned by Hainan Airlines (the company that has grown into HNA Group, which is not only an aviation firm but now also a media conglomerate) had its own horrendous scare. Capital Airlines flight JD5759 had to make an emergency landing in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen (Daily Star, "Passenger Plane"). What made this particular landing so noteworthy was that... well, it seems the pilot had been watching MF8667's pilot and he said "you call that the worst landing in history? Hold my baijiu and watch this."
The plane's front landing gear was missing both wheels.
If you don't believe me, just look at the photo in South China Morning Post's Article. According to this article, officials suspect that the wheels were torn off by wind-shear on the plane's attempt to land in Macau. The crew also reported damage to their communications systems and left engine (Zuo, SCMP).
Of course, what makes this incident noteworthy was that it was the second major incident due to equipment failure for this airline in less than a week, and the 3rd in 90 days.

Capital Airlines: When Getting There Alive Just Isn't an Option

On Sunday, 26 August, barely 2 days before the incident I just mentioned, Capital Airlines had another equipment failure. Flight JD5158 was on its way from Kunming to Hangzhou. It didn't get very far, apparently, before an emergency (whose nature the Chinese authorities have been rather hush-hush about) forced it to return to Kunming (Zhuang, SCMP). Now, China's state-media is desperate to downplay the incident by praising the crew's response (Chen, China Daily), while Fox News, flagship of the American Right, is sensationalizing it by focusing on the emotional turmoil of the passengers, most of whom were convinced they were going to die when the oxygen masks deployed and it became clear the plane was losing altitude at an alarming rate (Fox News, "Capital Airlines Passenger") , but neither of those comes as much of a surprise. After all, the former is subject to their owners (the Chinese government), the latter to their target audience (who hate China with a passion that even I find awe-inspiring sometimes). What disturbs me about the coverage of this incident is that, frankly, there hasn't been much. No Mainland-based papers have reported on it as far as I am aware (that China Daily article was the site's European edition), and Hong Kong's South China Morning Post has been eerily quiet since their original article, which did not give many details in its own right.
Of course, it is possible that Capital Airlines (which, as I have mentioned, is a subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned conglomerate that owns many of China's news outlets, including South China Morning Post, has pulled some strings to keep things quiet. They can ill-afford to have the public focussing on two incidents (a disaster and a near-disaster) in the same week, especially given that they had a horrifying near-miss back on 29 May (Reuters, "Capital Airlines Flight"). According to the information that's available (which, in typical Chinese fashion, isn't much), cracks appeared in a window shortly after Capital Airlines flight JD421 took off. Apparently not even the flight crew was fully aware of what the problem was, because Chinese social media shows the flight attendants telling the crew that the cracks were in the windshield (don't panic, right?), which was later denied by the airline, according to the UK-based Independent (Goh, The Independent).
Now, let's pause here. I realize that wind shear can get pretty ridiculous at that altitude and speed, especially in less than ideal weather. Having been on the ground not far from the Gulf Coast during Hurricanes Andrew, Katrina, Rita, and Gustav, I am well-aware that the wind can do some damage. However, aviation-grade equipment is made for exactly those conditions. For one plane to suffer engine damage, communication damage, and have the front landing wheels completely shorn off, after another had some shadowy equipment failure that led to near-catastrophic loss of altitude, and for another to have cracks in the window, and all within the span of 90 days, begins to show a pattern of poor maintenance (and piss-poor pre-flight safety checks by ground staff) on the part of this airline. Then, with the emergence of a theory about MF8667 that blames the skidding on faulty tires (it too lost its landing gear in the incident (Airways Mag)), one begins to question if this pattern may not be simply one airline, but China's entire air-travel industry. So, have other airlines in China had an unusual number of air-travel incidents involving equipment failure recently?

And the Survey Says... YES!

Most people would agree that the flight attendant on JD421 dropped the ball, hard, by telling the passengers cracks had appeared in the windshield, especially given that this apparently was not even true. However, there is a partial defense for her. One could suspect that the entire flight industry in China had broken windshields in-flight at the forefront of their nightmares, given that that is exactly what happened to Sichuan Airlines 3U8633 (BBC, "China Sichuan Airlines"). Much like the JD5158 incident later in the summer, China's state media is moving mountains to take people's attention off the absolutely catastrophic nature of such an equipment failure and say "look how heroic the pilot is for saving the plane!" (Straits Times, "Sichuan Airlines co-pilot"). I can't deny that the pilot did demonstrate amazingly quick reaction time and an admirable ability to stay cool under pressure, but while we're praising the pilot for handling the debacle, is anyone investigating how it happened in the first place? Airline windshields are tough. Have you ever seen how much damage a duck or goose carcass can do when it is flying at high speeds?
...Don't answer that, because if you have then I would prefer not to know how, but the way basic physics works is that whatever the plane hits, impacts the plane as if it was the plane was stationary and whatever it hit was flying at the plane's speed in the opposite direction. Even so, impact from birds or even large waterfowl typically only causes minor cracks in jetliner windshields, not a massive hole like the one visible in the photos in these articles.

The pattern of major equipment problems that seemingly should have been caught before the plane was ever allowed to fly, is increasing.
Of course, not all of China's airline foul-ups this summer have been cases of heroic pilots overcoming equipment failure caused by lazy and incompetent maintenance crews. Chinese pilots have left their own mark upon the time-honored art of jackassery. On 11 July, Air China flight CA 106, en route from Hong Kong to Dalian, had a loss of cabin pressure as it dropped 25,000 feet in 10 minutes, and deployed the oxygen masks. There was just one problem. One thing notable in its absence from these oxygen masks, was oxygen (Lee, SCMP, "Passengers"). Now, how did this happen? Well, the currently accepted explanation is that the pilot was too busy trying to cover up the evidence of the e-cigarette he was smoking in the cabin (Lee, SCMP, "Air China pilots") , but as for the absence of oxygen from the oxygen masks, that is where the story dives into realms of idocy that are inaccessible to most mere mortals, and which are only attainable by the Chinese. Observe this passage from Lee's July 11 SCMP article.

"The airline revealed the incident occurred after a pilot who was smoking an e-cigarette in the cockpit tried to turn off the aircraft’s circulation fan to prevent vapours reaching the cabin. But he mistakenly switched off the air conditioning system instead, resulting in insufficient oxygen and triggering the release of oxygen masks."

If I hired a full-time staff of China-hating trolls to write false articles bashing the Chinese, I can promise that none of them would be able to come up with anything that ridiculous. And speaking of ridiculous (and also of Air China), I know this does not directly relate to the issue of poor pre-flight checks and shoddy maintenance, but on the subject of Chinese airline mishaps in the past few months, I would be remiss if I did not give at least an over-the-shoulder nod to Air China's flight CA 1350, which was forced to make an emergency landing last April when one of its flight attendants was taken hostage...
...with a fountain pen (McCah, News.com.au)
...I feel like a "mightier than the sword" joke is just too obvious to even bother with at this point, so let me simply point out that it seems the would-be hijacker decided Mao was wrong about where political power comes from.

Anyway, joking aside, this is a really eyebrow-raising, worrisome trend of Chinese flights having absolutely ridiculous malfunctions, and as I pointed out earlier, a pattern of failures which should seemingly be noticed by even the most cursory pre-flight checks is definitely emerging. It truly does seem that the only thing more dangerous than living in China is trying to fly out of it, and the only thing more dangerous than breathing China's air...
...is being on a plane in it.

Works Cited

From the Web

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https://news.abs-cbn.com/news/08/18/18/caap-bars-xiamen-air-pilot-from-leaving-philippines

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Zuo, Mandy. "Wheels missing on plane after another emergency landing for Chinese budget carrier Capital Airlines." South China Morning Post. 28 Aug, 2018. Web. 6 Sep, 2018.
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