So much to say.
Beijing airport...find it difficult to give you arrival procedure before 1 minute at the arrival fix,(or you are given an arrival procedure and...a totally different arrival going in the total opposite direction!!) they can not advise your runway until your on the approach, and then they will change your runway up to 4 times.
cxa340so, I teach at an university here. Every semester, I get my schedule and textbooks on the eve of my first class. A summer or two ago, a Kiwi colleague booked his ticket through our boss, who was also arranging his visa renewals. That boss handed him his ticket and passport with updated visas no earlier than 2130LT on the eve of his departure. That's China: you wait till all of the jigsaw puzzle pieces are in optimal position before you wiggle the last few into place so you can commit and get it right on your first try. Obviously, this wracks nerves and requires a 24/7 standby mindset backed up by a laidback attitude.
The first thing you learn after moving to Asia, is that Chinese can not do anything right, besides copy expensive brands...
cxa340so, the locally trendy term for that is
Shanzhai: it's about learning through imitation until you reach proficiency sufficient to give you scope for personal creativity.
Shanzhai is how you got out of 4WD and learned to walk on two feet. It's how you learned the alphabet before moving on to prose and poetry of your own. In the 1960s, we were trashing Japs for that. We thought they all were all look-alikes too. It passed.
Midnight Oil, I subscribe entirely to your contribution. I am domestic SLF several times a year and all I could complain of was the pickled vegetables in the breakfast trays. I've since surrendered in and now eat them without sulking.
...IncompetEnt, Inefficient, Intransigent and lacking almost all of the lateral thought processes that most ATC systems...have to endure and overcome their own quite significant problems.
mephisto88, the Chinese are not lateral thinkers, they are quantum thinkers: We'll catch up eventually. After all, since Bohr and Heisenberg, we have been graced with Francesco Varela's quantum biology. IT now has quantum processing, I hear.
The problem comes when flexible, individual decision making is required...
Rather than confront the miscreant, you will be offered a change of room. In their minds, you don't have a problem, you are the problem and if you go away so does the problem.
Buttiebox, determining who is the source of the problem is subjective.
And this too is quantic: the attitude is that, if you change the position of a single piece on the chessboard, you are changing the whole game, so you think twice and thrice before acting. This is a family-oriented society. Some 3,000 (arguably 5,000 or 8,000) years of history's civil wars, droughts, floods, earthquakes and whatever have drilled it into their DNA that when the schlitz hits the fan, the only people who will go to the wall to save all four of your cheeks are family, friends and "connections". Western "rugged individualism" strikes them as falling somewhere between childish ego fixation and utter lunacy.
On your other issue, well, your turn of phrase shows you're learning. You're expected to be able to know how to suck it in after age 4 or so. On the other hand, everybody foreign and native alike has their quirks, so the first line of approach is to settle directly with the whiner. Complaining about noise in China is like complaining about paid parking in Manhattan or the scent of apple pie in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The nice part is that here they don't make you feel weird about you and your pet problem.
Yes, Lancer, everything has a flipside or two. There are culture bumps wherever you go.
.Yes, Colonel Wong wants to fly his MiG 17 copy for twenty minutes and half the country's commercial airspace shuts down.
Captain Dart, I guess you mean the licence-built version of the MiG-17 known as the Shenyang Jianji 5 "Fresco": the last was retired in 1995 (Source:
Peoples Liberation Army Air Force).
There are however some 500 J-7 Fishbeds (MiG-21) in service (
ibid.).
Since then the native-built if Lavi-like J-10 and Sukhoi 27 Flanker buzz around here and there every other now and then.
China is 5,026 km wide E/W and somewhat less N/S (
Geography of China - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) : the Flanker's combat radius is 1,340 km but heck, let's make it 3,530 at altitude instead of measly sea level (
Combat radius - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). So yes, that's about "half" the country. More if you throw in external fuel tanks perhaps. Not sure if there are any real mission profiles for that -- my guess is they find fuel capacity more useful as loitering time, but 3,530 is 3,530. Loitering time would exceed 20 minutes though.
Given the array of US troops and materiel in the region, the Central Military Commission has deployed its people and widgets for optimum response to massive incursions from the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan, so the Beijing and the Eastern seaboard is where airline captains are most likely to feel occasionally unwelcome and get upset.
If you like the 17 however, I know where you can see one parked as a kiddie display right next to the Yellow River. It has a cool radome too. However, there is a stunning airforce museum about 60km north of Beijing that used to be an air defence base. The exhibition area starts out as a semi-circular tunnel dug into solid mountainside. Featured aircraft include a B-29 clone called the Tupolev 4 fitted out with an AWACS radome.
I would be much happier if they told the truth and said "gweilo delay control".
My other favourite is how we ( mostly ) fly around 6-10,000 below optimum levels until there is bad turbulence and then guess...where we end up
Hongkongfooey, it won't happen. I like straight answers too but forget it. These folks would walk miles in 50°C sunshine to avoid embarrassing anyone including themselves. And you.
The other piece of essential Survival Chinese is
guanxi: mutual backscratching or, more technically, it's social capital. Get to know the ATCs. Drink with them (you folks still have oxygen cylinders in the cockpit and they still leak, right?). Read up on nepotism too: contrary to popular myth, there is a stack of Western sociological studies that show it is both socially and economically efficient. The locals here have known that for several millennia and have an operating manual all their own for "invisible hand of the market".
Hope this helps.
Have a great day.