chinadaily.com.cn
 |
Boeing says its procurement
from China
is significantly greater than other aviation companies. It is Chinese aviation
manufacturing industry's largest foreign customer. Li Xing / China Daily
|
SEATTLE - Top executives at Boeing Commercial Airplanes all have
stories to tell about their first trips to China.
Nicole Piasecki,
vice-president of business development and strategic integration at Boeing
Commercial Airplanes, first traveled to China in 1985 during an exchange
program. She remembers flying to Xi'an
in an old Russian plane. The seats were not firmly secured.
"When we were taking
off, our whole row went back," she recalled.
Now, China is a frequent destination because Boeing's
strong relationship with China
in the aviation sector.
The China office of US
aircraft manufacturer Boeing Co said in late April that an expansion of its
venture in North China's port city of Tianjin
will be operational by 2013. The $21-million project will double the size of
Boeing Tianjin Composites Co Ltd, a joint venture between Boeing and the China
Aviation Industry Corp, which produces components for the Boeing 737, 747, 767,
777 and the 787 Dreamliner aircraft.
The expansion will increase
the venture's production capacity by 60 percent by 2013 and add 300 jobs,
bringing the venture's total employment to more than 1,000.
"I'd like to think we
(Boeing and China) are partners," James F. Albaugh, executive
vice-president of Boeing Co, said in an exclusive interview with China Daily in
December. "We worked with China
to develop its aviation industry, aviation infrastructure, and we continue to
depend on them as they, I hope, depend on us."
Albaugh is confident in the
China's potential for
growth, despite competition from Airbus in Europe and China's effort
to expand its high-speed railways and build its own aircraft.
"The prospects of China are very
good," said Albaugh, who is also president and CEO of Boeing Commercial
Airplanes.
During his first visit to China, he was told that China needed to
buy 200 airplanes a year to keep up with demand and interest in traveling. But
Albaugh disagrees. "In my view, there is going to be a lot more than that,
close to 300," he said.
Albaugh said taking into
account the number of airports China was going to build, as well as "the
size of the population; the percentage of the population that is likely to fly
but hasn't flown yet; the percentage of the population that now wants to fly for
leisure, travel; the number of tourists and business people that are coming to
China from other countries".
Randy Tinseth,
vice-president of marketing for Boeing Commercial Airplanes, had more data to
show how China
is "the market moving forward".
He told China Daily he
based his analysis not only on China's
present development, but also on a 20-year forecast that his research team has
produced every year since the 1950s. The data "allows us to take a fresh
look at the market and incorporate the latest thinking and analysis of the
market", Tinseth said
Having gone through the
economic cycles and business challenges from nearly six decades, Tinseth said
air travel still managed to grow about 5 percent a year. This is because of the
strong link between air travel and the economy and people's curiosities and
their need to travel, he said.
Today, Boeing has 31
customers in China
flying about 870 Boeing airplanes. Moreover, Tinseth reckoned that about 190
million Chinese fly in Boeing airplanes. Last November, he announced in Beijing that his company projected that China would
need 4,330 new commercial airplanes, valued at $480 billion, over the next 20
years.
In short, 20 years from
now, more than 40 percent of all travel will begin and end within the
Asia-Pacific market," Tinseth said, and China makes up about 40 percent of
that demand.
"This is our idea of
the important role that Asia as well as China will play," he said.
By 2030, China's passenger
traffic will reach 1.5 billion, Tinseth said, quoting from Boeing's recent
20-year forecast.
Tinseth said he and his
team are aware of China's
ambitious plan to develop a high-speed rail system. Boeing sees it as both
competition and complementing the travel sector.
His research team examined
the high-speed rail development plan. They concluded that a high-speed rail
system would attract a lot more passenger flow for cities within 800 km of each
other.
Travelers are likely to
debate between whether to ride or fly when cities are 800 to 1,200 km apart.
But they believe that most
passengers would favor air travel if the distance goes beyond 1,200 km, as
personal wealth grows and time becomes more important, Tinseth said.
Boeing's footprints in China go far
beyond selling airplanes.
"There is not a plane
we built that doesn't have parts from China in it," Albaugh said.
According to Boeing, its
procurement from China
is "significantly greater than other aviation companies. Boeing is China's
aviation manufacturing industry's largest foreign customer."
"When you look at all
our joint ventures in China,
we employ about 6,000 people in total," Tinseth said.
Ray Conner, Boeing
Commercial Airplanes' vice-president and general manager of its supply chain
management and operations, made his first trip to China in 1988. He was part of the
Boeing team to move the production of vertical fins to Xi'an.
Conner showed a map of China marked
with dots of field service, technical support, training and flight simulators
across the country. Its field service reaches as far west as Ali,
Tibet autonomous region; Harbin, Heilongjiang
province in the Northeast; and Haikou
in the South. It also covers some second- or third-tier cities, such as Dunhuang
in Gansu, Jiuzhaigou in Sichuan,
and Linzhi (Nyingchi) in Tibet.
Apart from vertical fins
manufactured in Xi'an, horizontal stabilizers
are made in Shanghai and a joint venture in Tianjin produces interior
component parts and nonmetallic composite work for airplanes, Conner said.
Chinese manufacturers in Shanghai, Xi'an, Tianjin as well as in Chengdu
and Shenyang
also contribute parts to Boeing's "next-generation" 737s, also called
787 Dreamliner, or 747-8s.
"I've watched our
relationship grow" and China
is "participating in every one of our airplanes today", Conner said,
while his company has been "part of the fabric of the whole aviation
industry in China".
Since 1993, Boeing has
helped train more than 37,000 Chinese pilots, mechanics, engineers and other
professionals in flight operations, maintenance, air traffic management,
manufacturing, quality assurance, finance and industrial engineering, according
to Boeing.
A model of a Cathay Pacific
freighter stands by the door inside the office of Lou Mancini, senior
vice-president in charge of commercial aviation services. An airplane piece is
kept in a glass frame on a shelf on the other side of the door.
The piece was cut from a
747-400 Cathay Pacific airplane to create a cargo door when it was converted
into a freighter in 2005.
It was the first conversion
job done by Taeco-Taikoo (Xiamen) Aircraft
Engineering Co Ltd, a joint venture in Xiamen
in airplane repair, maintenance, part manufacturing, component service and
conversion, with Boeing holding 9.1 percent of the shares.
The piece was cut out on
April 28, 2005, and since then, Taeco has finished between 35 to 40 new 747-400
Boeing converted freighters, Mancini said.
A computer monitor in
Mancini's office, which is linked to its operations center, maintains almost
real-time watch over the 1,500 Boeing airplanes while they are flying. It's a
"fancy prognostic forecasting system, so you can monitor your airplane and
figure out what maintenance it is going to need in a next couple or three
days," Mancini said.
Around the world, 40
customers, including Air China,
use the tracking service, available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
"You know exactly the
status of an airplane in 20 seconds," Mancini said. "I can log on at
home with my iPad and watch airplanes flying."
In terms of pilot training,
Boeing is moving a 787 flight simulator to Shanghai, to join five 767 simulators already
in place, Mancini said.
Boeing is also involved in
air traffic management in China.
Before the Beijing Olympics, it worked with Beijing Capital
International Airport
to optimize the airspace around the airport to increase capacity.
Mancini highlighted Boeing
service teams now spread across China.
With the required navigation performance technology, Boeing has worked with
Chinese airlines to fly into Nyingchi,
Tibet, in
between the mountains on the roof of the world.
"We are very
interested in air traffic management, and we would like to help China
out," he said.
As Chinese airlines fly
more Boeing aircrafts, its services will also grow in China.
"We are global but
local," Mancini said. "I cannot imagine supporting the world without
being local."
Despite a Mandarin table at
the operations center, Mancini said Boeing will build a satellite facility in Beijing and have it up
and running around June. It will also be connected with the computer systems at
the main operation center and all the telecommunication systems in the US.
"It will allow us to
better understand China's
market and its growing needs," Mancini said.
He said Boeing is likely to
employ more local people who understand the local culture.
"I will never be able
to understand Chinese culture. Why don't I get more people on the team?"
he said.
Mancini said, "you
have an extremely expanding market, and we want to be part of it obviously. So
we think we'd better be very close to you, geographically and culturally so
that we are providing such good support that you want to be on our team".
Piasecki highlighted China's need to
invest in training young pilots who do not have enough hours, such as former
air force pilots.
Technology upgrade is also
a far cry in the growing aviation industry.
"The 787 Dreamliner
has so much technology on it that it is a completely new generation in aviation
that no one has seen before," she said.
