Excellent article in the Wall Street Journal on a topic near and dear to my heart: air safety. The article is entitled “How China Turned Around A Dismal Air-Safety Record Foreign Help Combined With Willful Regulator” and it discusses how China’s air safety (which I knew to be good) has risen to the level of great. Interestingly, the article also talks about how China’s action on air safety might be applied similarly to the product safety.
For much of the 1990s, Chinese air safety was “arguably the world’s most dangerous, beset by persistent pilot errors, unreliable maintenance and erratic government oversight.” Today, however, China is “an acclaimed global leader in air safety” with fatal-accident rates lower than America’s and Europe’s. China achieved this turnaround under Yang Yuanyuan (a/k/a Triple Y), “a hard-charging aviation official” who made it a point to “adopt a more open attitude” and to learn from foreign accidents and incidents.
China took the following steps to reduce crashes:
• Established programs for Chinese regulators and airline officials to learn from their U.S. counterparts
• Enlisted help from governments and manufacturers to draft new safety regulations and procedures
• Relied on international aviation safety organizations to conduct audits, recommend improvements
• Increased training for mechanics, pilots, government inspectors, airline officials
• Pledged close cooperation with foreign crash investigators
Chet Ekstrand, a senior Boeing safety expert who worked with China on improving its airplane safety, marveled “at how the Chinese ‘could be so candid in revealing shortcomings’ to outsiders.” China’s aviation authority took its task very seriously:
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.
China also did not hesitate to secure assistance from outside China:
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.
China’s commercial aviation sector is also surprisingly transparent:
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.
All this has led the accident rate for Chinese carriers to improve “roughly tenfold since the mid-1990s” during which time fatality rates moved in the opposite direction in Africa and parts of the former Soviet Union. No Chinese jetliner has crashed since 2004 giving China the “best safety performance in the world in the past three years.”
The article sees China product safety as a similar challenge as it too will require China “balance safety and growth.” Both also require a “very strong, central agency to establish rules” plus “well-trained people able to adapt and impose them in the Chinese environment.”
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