The real reason China is building so many GA airports
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The real reason China is building so many GA airports
From Aviation Week...
"Is China’s airport development program a serious attempt to bring air transportation to the country’s far-flung regions? Are the hundreds of airports planned going to truly open the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to business aviation? Will the fields play a major role in developing a new generation of civil-trained pilots for the PRC’s aviation industry? Will they encourage China’s well-heeled entrepreneurs to earn pilot licenses and purchase their own aircraft?
These questions frame the objectives of the government’s stated general aviation development plan — or so we are to believe. “Operating in China” (BCA, November 2017, page 42) outlined this initiative. The story cited Asian Business Aviation Association (AsBAA) Chairwoman Jenny Lau, who said the foundation of the program was pilot training and small airport development, since the former could not be carried out without the latter. The aim of the initiative, according to the director general of the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), is to have 2,000 airports constructed by 2030 to serve 2,800 cities and townships, primarily in China’s thinly populated western region.
As of last fall, 311 general aviation airports were claimed to have been completed, with 74 awarded CAAC approval and the others still awaiting certification. But there were two clues that there might be more to the airport-building program than was publicly apparent. First, the runways at these fields are universally 800 meters (2,625 ft.) in length, perhaps sufficient for primary flight training but not long enough to accommodate most business jets, certainly not the intercontinental types foreign visitors would be operating into the country’s outback.
Secondly, under the communist system adopted by the Chinese under Chairman Mao Zedong after World War II, there is no privately owned land, as technically, everything belongs to the state. So, it is difficult — again, technically — for non-government entities like developers to be able to build retail or residential structures.
Meanwhile, many of the small towns in western China that wanted airports under the general aviation initiative lacked the financial resources to do so. Enter private developers.
Closely watching these developments unfold was Francis Chao, editor and publisher of China Civil Aviation Report and managing director of Uniworld LLC, a marketing support company in Beijing. Chao, who divides his time between Beijing and Pittsburg, California, near San Francisco, has a different take on the PRC’s general aviation program.
Cutting the Cake
In China today the aviation industry “is a big cake,” Chao says and “everyone wants a share.” Civil aviation was “owned and operated” by the state until 1979, when the system was liberalized, allowing the formation of airlines. Now, almost 40 years later, having been exposed to business aviation from visiting operators and recognizing a need to open up China’s remote regions lacking air service, the government has begun to see the need for a general aviation system to supplement airline service and develop new generations of pilots and maintenance technicians.
But there was no knowledge base in the country to support building a general aviation industry from scratch or even an understanding of its freedom of operation in a country where control of every aspect of public life is dominant.
For example, China’s air traffic control system, operated by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), is set up to accommodate only military and commercial aviation, not operators who want to fly where and when they desire. Integrating ad hoc operations into that system will require a major restructuring of air traffic management as well as ground-based infrastructure.
“The PRC government — the CAAC, the military and the Office of the Premier of China — is there to regulate and not to serve or help,” Chao observed. But the PRC is committed to establishing a general aviation sector, and as it has done with great public works projects in the past, it threw millions of yuans (the Chinese currency) at the endeavor, purchasing general aviation OEMs like Cirrus Aircraft and Continental Motors as a means of laying the groundwork. However, it still lacked an operational infrastructure, mainly airports, to support its nascent industry, and in 2015, the premier delegated the authority to build a network of general aviation airports to cash-strapped local governments throughout the country. By 2030, he claimed, there would be a general aviation airport in all 2,800 counties in China. “Later they modified it to 500 general aviation airports by 2020,” Chao said.
“Under the old order,” Chao explained, “if you wanted to build an airport, you had to go to the central government [and deal with extensive bureaucracy], and few wanted to do that, so they exploited a loophole to build landing strips limited to 800 meters.” The “little secret” about that, he says, was that these airports were not really about aviation but a scheme by local developers to secure land. “So the central government released land that people could develop for profit. In Chinese, it’s called ‘red-line drawing’ — you are ‘blessed’ to use the land for a specified purpose, and once you have the red line drawn on a map, you can move people out of that area, develop it, and raise its value.”
The general aviation initiative is the first time in China’s history that land has been “blessed” by the central government, allowing developers to borrow money against it through government-owned banks. “Now there are hundreds of ‘general aviation industrial parks,’” Chao said, “and most of them have an 800-m runway, a huge terminal, a control tower, hangars and a few light airplanes — as in the PRC, you can start a general aviation company with only two airplanes — and hardly any aviation activity. Also, a large city will have been built there, but the focus will not be the airport, which was just a way to get the land to be able to develop a city.”
No Place to Go
But the subterfuge, he says, is that “everyone knows that in China there is limited airspace for general aviation to begin with because the military is not relaxing ATC to accommodate it. You won’t get permission for a flight plan, and you can only fly within a 30-km [16-nm] radius of the airport and up to a 1,000-m [3,280-ft.] ceiling, good only for basic training and ‘discovery flights.’”
Some 30 of these airports are owned by the Aviation Industry Corp. of China (AVIC), which Chao claims has subcontracted to developers to improve the land and build the airports. “The developers are not there for aviation,” he maintains, “their focus is on developing the land. They know that the military isn’t going to liberalize ATC any time soon so they’re ‘relaxed’ and getting loans from the state-owned banks.”
Some background on PRC aviation fiefdoms may be in order here. “China started with military aviation [in the late 1940s] and built commercial aviation later,” Chao said. “At that time, they separated the PRC Air Force into two parts: one to defend the country and the other to develop commercial aviation as the CAAC.” Originally, the CAAC embraced both rulemaking and operation of China’s national airline, which carried the same acronym in its livery. Eventually, the airline was spun off, and the CAAC reverted to being solely a regulator.
With the liberalization of commercial aviation in the 1980s, airlines developed rapidly, and the CAAC, now fully divorced from the military, rode higher in the PRC bureaucracy on the success of the commercial carriers it was vested with regulating. “And the part of the military that was in charge of the airspace that the airlines were flying through realized that all they had was airspace,” Chao explained. “They did not want to cooperate with civil aviation and began to leverage the airspace to their own advantage.”
Now the PRC government wants to open the airspace to general aviation, but the military-operated ATC establishment claims it cannot detect small aircraft on its radar and wants them to be universally equipped with ADS-B. “But ATC doesn’t want ADS-B powered by the U.S.-owned GPS constellation,” Chao said. Thus, the PRC has developed its own satellite-based navigation system called North Star, which is only partially operational at this time and, of course, operated by the military for total control.
“And the military is debating with the CAAC as to who will operate FSSs,” Chao added. “Debate goes on and on, and, in the meantime, the airport developers are using the general aviation initiative to be land developers. The CAAC wants the military to relax ATC for general aviation and so the airlines can have better on-time records. ATC is also using ‘national security’ as an excuse, too. So that power struggle creates an opportunity for a land-developing scheme under the ruse of general aviation.”
In 2004, the central government canceled 6,000 industrial-zone projects allegedly because local governments were using them as a scheme for land development. “They didn’t have enough people at those developments to justify the use of the land or create an industrial base,” Chao said. “The government says you have to build something, but they don’t say you have to sell it! So the developers hold onto these projects to create value. Meanwhile, the government wants GDP to enhance the country’s reputation. In China everything is a process.”
According to Chao, the China Academy of Civil Aviation Science and Technology, the CAAC’s arm for regulation and policy similar to the Mitre Corp. and its work for the FAA, has figured out that the airport developments are the same as the bogus industrial schemes. In response, last year the National Development and Reform Commission of the central government directed the Academy to come up with a solution to upgrade general aviation airports already built and new ones planned for the future.
Land Grab
“They are developing an airport standard and specifications for the local governments to follow down the road,” Chao said. “They have figured out what the locals have done previously by using the general aviation airport program as a land grab and are sending a message that if local governments want to participate in the future national airport network, they have to adhere to the new specifications.
“So the central government sounds like it wants to develop general aviation,” he continued. “It could be so easy if they opened ATC and let the general public pursue flying. This would ultimately support MRO, FBOs, fuel sales, and so forth. Operators will come in. Once it grows, it will assist development of the towns, and people will move away from the coasts. We need to help China to find a better way to develop the country and second- and third-tier cities.
“You need an airport to provide better transportation and bring in business and companies. You also need it as a public service for emergency medical transport, transportation of supplies as a third-tier source, and so forth. Ninety-five percent of Chinese are ‘coastal,’ with 5% living elsewhere in the interior — so the PRC’s ‘go-west’ program has had zero effect. If they can improve the second- and third-tier cities, they can encourage migration to the west. They are competing for resources along the coast and concentrating industry there, and that’s resulting in concentrating pollution. If you can spread that out, you will reduce pollution overall. I have attempted to educate the government of this.”
State-owned companies foster too much corruption and interbreeding, Chao believes. “This is why everything is done ‘the Chinese Way.’ So you have to bring the private sector in to break that culture. The reason why everything is so expensive for business aviation is because the CAAC divides its industry vertically so there is no lateral cooperation. How can FBOs make money when they cannot sell fuel? They hike up the price for ground handling, and that’s all they’re required to do. Jet fuel is supplied and sold by China Aviation Oil Supply Company, and they dominate that industry. Everything is state owned. The government does not want competition between entities or between them and itself. ATC isn’t there to serve but to control and regulate.”
While the PRC claims it wants to learn about business aviation, Chao pointed out, it is clear it wants to conduct it in a different way than in the U.S., “that is, it will be Chinese-style. So the U.S. model is just for reference. In terms of training pilots, you can’t do cross-country flying under the current system, so you can’t solo or get a license. This is why they train their pilots in the U.S. and other countries.
“They don’t see business aviation as a tool because most of the local corporations are state-owned, and the people who are regulating them are traveling on the ground, so the government sees using business jets as corrupt or unnecessary. This is why many of the based business jets have foreign registration,” he said, adding, Innovation in China is not a priority.”
Doubts About China?s Airport Program | Business Aviation content from Aviation Week
"Is China’s airport development program a serious attempt to bring air transportation to the country’s far-flung regions? Are the hundreds of airports planned going to truly open the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to business aviation? Will the fields play a major role in developing a new generation of civil-trained pilots for the PRC’s aviation industry? Will they encourage China’s well-heeled entrepreneurs to earn pilot licenses and purchase their own aircraft?
These questions frame the objectives of the government’s stated general aviation development plan — or so we are to believe. “Operating in China” (BCA, November 2017, page 42) outlined this initiative. The story cited Asian Business Aviation Association (AsBAA) Chairwoman Jenny Lau, who said the foundation of the program was pilot training and small airport development, since the former could not be carried out without the latter. The aim of the initiative, according to the director general of the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), is to have 2,000 airports constructed by 2030 to serve 2,800 cities and townships, primarily in China’s thinly populated western region.
As of last fall, 311 general aviation airports were claimed to have been completed, with 74 awarded CAAC approval and the others still awaiting certification. But there were two clues that there might be more to the airport-building program than was publicly apparent. First, the runways at these fields are universally 800 meters (2,625 ft.) in length, perhaps sufficient for primary flight training but not long enough to accommodate most business jets, certainly not the intercontinental types foreign visitors would be operating into the country’s outback.
Secondly, under the communist system adopted by the Chinese under Chairman Mao Zedong after World War II, there is no privately owned land, as technically, everything belongs to the state. So, it is difficult — again, technically — for non-government entities like developers to be able to build retail or residential structures.
Meanwhile, many of the small towns in western China that wanted airports under the general aviation initiative lacked the financial resources to do so. Enter private developers.
Closely watching these developments unfold was Francis Chao, editor and publisher of China Civil Aviation Report and managing director of Uniworld LLC, a marketing support company in Beijing. Chao, who divides his time between Beijing and Pittsburg, California, near San Francisco, has a different take on the PRC’s general aviation program.
Cutting the Cake
In China today the aviation industry “is a big cake,” Chao says and “everyone wants a share.” Civil aviation was “owned and operated” by the state until 1979, when the system was liberalized, allowing the formation of airlines. Now, almost 40 years later, having been exposed to business aviation from visiting operators and recognizing a need to open up China’s remote regions lacking air service, the government has begun to see the need for a general aviation system to supplement airline service and develop new generations of pilots and maintenance technicians.
But there was no knowledge base in the country to support building a general aviation industry from scratch or even an understanding of its freedom of operation in a country where control of every aspect of public life is dominant.
For example, China’s air traffic control system, operated by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), is set up to accommodate only military and commercial aviation, not operators who want to fly where and when they desire. Integrating ad hoc operations into that system will require a major restructuring of air traffic management as well as ground-based infrastructure.
“The PRC government — the CAAC, the military and the Office of the Premier of China — is there to regulate and not to serve or help,” Chao observed. But the PRC is committed to establishing a general aviation sector, and as it has done with great public works projects in the past, it threw millions of yuans (the Chinese currency) at the endeavor, purchasing general aviation OEMs like Cirrus Aircraft and Continental Motors as a means of laying the groundwork. However, it still lacked an operational infrastructure, mainly airports, to support its nascent industry, and in 2015, the premier delegated the authority to build a network of general aviation airports to cash-strapped local governments throughout the country. By 2030, he claimed, there would be a general aviation airport in all 2,800 counties in China. “Later they modified it to 500 general aviation airports by 2020,” Chao said.
“Under the old order,” Chao explained, “if you wanted to build an airport, you had to go to the central government [and deal with extensive bureaucracy], and few wanted to do that, so they exploited a loophole to build landing strips limited to 800 meters.” The “little secret” about that, he says, was that these airports were not really about aviation but a scheme by local developers to secure land. “So the central government released land that people could develop for profit. In Chinese, it’s called ‘red-line drawing’ — you are ‘blessed’ to use the land for a specified purpose, and once you have the red line drawn on a map, you can move people out of that area, develop it, and raise its value.”
The general aviation initiative is the first time in China’s history that land has been “blessed” by the central government, allowing developers to borrow money against it through government-owned banks. “Now there are hundreds of ‘general aviation industrial parks,’” Chao said, “and most of them have an 800-m runway, a huge terminal, a control tower, hangars and a few light airplanes — as in the PRC, you can start a general aviation company with only two airplanes — and hardly any aviation activity. Also, a large city will have been built there, but the focus will not be the airport, which was just a way to get the land to be able to develop a city.”
No Place to Go
But the subterfuge, he says, is that “everyone knows that in China there is limited airspace for general aviation to begin with because the military is not relaxing ATC to accommodate it. You won’t get permission for a flight plan, and you can only fly within a 30-km [16-nm] radius of the airport and up to a 1,000-m [3,280-ft.] ceiling, good only for basic training and ‘discovery flights.’”
Some 30 of these airports are owned by the Aviation Industry Corp. of China (AVIC), which Chao claims has subcontracted to developers to improve the land and build the airports. “The developers are not there for aviation,” he maintains, “their focus is on developing the land. They know that the military isn’t going to liberalize ATC any time soon so they’re ‘relaxed’ and getting loans from the state-owned banks.”
Some background on PRC aviation fiefdoms may be in order here. “China started with military aviation [in the late 1940s] and built commercial aviation later,” Chao said. “At that time, they separated the PRC Air Force into two parts: one to defend the country and the other to develop commercial aviation as the CAAC.” Originally, the CAAC embraced both rulemaking and operation of China’s national airline, which carried the same acronym in its livery. Eventually, the airline was spun off, and the CAAC reverted to being solely a regulator.
With the liberalization of commercial aviation in the 1980s, airlines developed rapidly, and the CAAC, now fully divorced from the military, rode higher in the PRC bureaucracy on the success of the commercial carriers it was vested with regulating. “And the part of the military that was in charge of the airspace that the airlines were flying through realized that all they had was airspace,” Chao explained. “They did not want to cooperate with civil aviation and began to leverage the airspace to their own advantage.”
Now the PRC government wants to open the airspace to general aviation, but the military-operated ATC establishment claims it cannot detect small aircraft on its radar and wants them to be universally equipped with ADS-B. “But ATC doesn’t want ADS-B powered by the U.S.-owned GPS constellation,” Chao said. Thus, the PRC has developed its own satellite-based navigation system called North Star, which is only partially operational at this time and, of course, operated by the military for total control.
“And the military is debating with the CAAC as to who will operate FSSs,” Chao added. “Debate goes on and on, and, in the meantime, the airport developers are using the general aviation initiative to be land developers. The CAAC wants the military to relax ATC for general aviation and so the airlines can have better on-time records. ATC is also using ‘national security’ as an excuse, too. So that power struggle creates an opportunity for a land-developing scheme under the ruse of general aviation.”
In 2004, the central government canceled 6,000 industrial-zone projects allegedly because local governments were using them as a scheme for land development. “They didn’t have enough people at those developments to justify the use of the land or create an industrial base,” Chao said. “The government says you have to build something, but they don’t say you have to sell it! So the developers hold onto these projects to create value. Meanwhile, the government wants GDP to enhance the country’s reputation. In China everything is a process.”
According to Chao, the China Academy of Civil Aviation Science and Technology, the CAAC’s arm for regulation and policy similar to the Mitre Corp. and its work for the FAA, has figured out that the airport developments are the same as the bogus industrial schemes. In response, last year the National Development and Reform Commission of the central government directed the Academy to come up with a solution to upgrade general aviation airports already built and new ones planned for the future.
Land Grab
“They are developing an airport standard and specifications for the local governments to follow down the road,” Chao said. “They have figured out what the locals have done previously by using the general aviation airport program as a land grab and are sending a message that if local governments want to participate in the future national airport network, they have to adhere to the new specifications.
“So the central government sounds like it wants to develop general aviation,” he continued. “It could be so easy if they opened ATC and let the general public pursue flying. This would ultimately support MRO, FBOs, fuel sales, and so forth. Operators will come in. Once it grows, it will assist development of the towns, and people will move away from the coasts. We need to help China to find a better way to develop the country and second- and third-tier cities.
“You need an airport to provide better transportation and bring in business and companies. You also need it as a public service for emergency medical transport, transportation of supplies as a third-tier source, and so forth. Ninety-five percent of Chinese are ‘coastal,’ with 5% living elsewhere in the interior — so the PRC’s ‘go-west’ program has had zero effect. If they can improve the second- and third-tier cities, they can encourage migration to the west. They are competing for resources along the coast and concentrating industry there, and that’s resulting in concentrating pollution. If you can spread that out, you will reduce pollution overall. I have attempted to educate the government of this.”
State-owned companies foster too much corruption and interbreeding, Chao believes. “This is why everything is done ‘the Chinese Way.’ So you have to bring the private sector in to break that culture. The reason why everything is so expensive for business aviation is because the CAAC divides its industry vertically so there is no lateral cooperation. How can FBOs make money when they cannot sell fuel? They hike up the price for ground handling, and that’s all they’re required to do. Jet fuel is supplied and sold by China Aviation Oil Supply Company, and they dominate that industry. Everything is state owned. The government does not want competition between entities or between them and itself. ATC isn’t there to serve but to control and regulate.”
While the PRC claims it wants to learn about business aviation, Chao pointed out, it is clear it wants to conduct it in a different way than in the U.S., “that is, it will be Chinese-style. So the U.S. model is just for reference. In terms of training pilots, you can’t do cross-country flying under the current system, so you can’t solo or get a license. This is why they train their pilots in the U.S. and other countries.
“They don’t see business aviation as a tool because most of the local corporations are state-owned, and the people who are regulating them are traveling on the ground, so the government sees using business jets as corrupt or unnecessary. This is why many of the based business jets have foreign registration,” he said, adding, Innovation in China is not a priority.”
Doubts About China?s Airport Program | Business Aviation content from Aviation Week
Folks,
To those of us who have spent a lot of time in PRC in recent years, nothing new here, indeed the present prospects are less promising than ten years ago. Top of the list, ATC (PLA) simply ignores "civil aviation development" policy ---- lots of promises, very little action.
Tootle pip!!
To those of us who have spent a lot of time in PRC in recent years, nothing new here, indeed the present prospects are less promising than ten years ago. Top of the list, ATC (PLA) simply ignores "civil aviation development" policy ---- lots of promises, very little action.
Tootle pip!!
Agreed
My limited experience with China so far is one trip to Yinchuan and a few flying through Chinese airspace. However that was more than enough to realise NOTHING will happen until the PLA relinquishes control of ATC. They can talk about aviation booming over there and endless expansion of Chinese airlines, but it all comes to nothing with the current restrictive ATC system.
When they officially change it to non military control, you know they’re getting serious about expanding aviation. Until then, it’s all talk.
When they officially change it to non military control, you know they’re getting serious about expanding aviation. Until then, it’s all talk.
China's military could define a network of easy to monitor airways to be used for all civil flights. East Germany that was in a similar way military only controlled ATC wise had a similar system. Every commercial flight, like cropdusters, Interflug domestic flights had to use those routes. Not really comfortable to ziczac around the country but something to begin with. China's inland has so much space there would be room for everybody no doubt.
It looked like this and was mainly used for low level VFR flight. Guiding flights around military areas and staying away from military airfields.
https://www.google.de/search?q=DDR+%C3%96rtliche+Fluglinien&rlz=1C1GGRV_enDE749DE7 49&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwilhYK175vcAhXIKVAKHf 8-DAkQ_AUICigB&biw=1680&bih=917#imgrc=MX3HmphATesiTM:
It looked like this and was mainly used for low level VFR flight. Guiding flights around military areas and staying away from military airfields.
https://www.google.de/search?q=DDR+%C3%96rtliche+Fluglinien&rlz=1C1GGRV_enDE749DE7 49&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwilhYK175vcAhXIKVAKHf 8-DAkQ_AUICigB&biw=1680&bih=917#imgrc=MX3HmphATesiTM:
Less Hair,
Yes, they could, but they don't.
They could comply with Government policy as announced by senior Government and PLA spokespersons at many an aviation conference, but they don't.
Indeed, they could comply with their own announced policy and timetable on airspace change, but they don't.
Tootle pip!!
Yes, they could, but they don't.
They could comply with Government policy as announced by senior Government and PLA spokespersons at many an aviation conference, but they don't.
Indeed, they could comply with their own announced policy and timetable on airspace change, but they don't.
Tootle pip!!
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China has developed pac750 aircraft into pilotless freight drones. Who needs pilots.
what size drone could be landed at these new airports? Herc size or bigger.?
what size drone could be landed at these new airports? Herc size or bigger.?
It's not just just about pilots, the "official" Beijing policy is to have a GA sector as big and as comprehensive as USA by some date in the future.
Without general and reasonably unfettered access to airspace, it can't happen.
Tootle pip!!
