The trouble with getting takeoff and landing slots in China

Often, I think I know China well. However, just as often, it occurs to me that I don't really know what I thought I knew. The visions and experiences collected and stored in my mind while I am awake are gone after I have slept. Reasoning and understanding seem to last only for a few hours before becoming illusory: the images and meanings disappear one by one, stolen from me by apparitions and secreted away, never to be returned in their original form. The understandings that I have assiduously acquired are nothing more than banal when bound together to try and shape the oldest continuous civilization on earth. Experience, learning, and proudly possessed knowledge, gained from many sources and from interaction with its people, are taken from everyone who thinks they know China and passed on to others who share them smugly, use them with confidence, reverently broadcast them as Gospel for a few praiseworthy moments. "I know China." Then, time and circumstance mangle them until they are beyond comprehension. These ,too, will be passed on and shared as truth, only to be proved wrong again. The enigma is this: China never changes, but China always changes. Its people beset by burden, affected with melancholy, inured to bewilderment, and suckled on uninterrupted millennia of incalculable hopelessness and sorrow. "There is chaos under heaven and things could not be better", said Mao Zedong. This is the real truth: "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese" - Charles De Gaulle. China: don't ask, it is what it is... ,,,,,,,,W.D. Box

04/27/2010

The trouble with getting takeoff and landing slots in China

It's easy to beat up on American Airlines for its decision to delay its Chicago-Beijing service on the day it was to be launched.
But several have pointed us to a South China Morning Post article in which the Hong Kong newspaper says top Chinese aviation officials "have been accused of illegally selling sought-after landing slots to the country's major carriers."
Other U.S. airlines currently flying to Beijing have favorable times, along the lines of what American expected to receive. Looking at their experience, American expected similar treatment.
United Airlines flights arrives from Chicago at 2:40 p.m., from San Francisco at 3:15 p.m. and from Washington at 2:20 p.m. Continental Airlines' flight from Newark arrives at 1:50 p.m. So American had reason to expect it would get better times that the middle of the night.
Read more at The Dallas Morning News