Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
Direct flights between Taiwan and China raise, once again, the specter of the airline that never was.
Feb 11, 2005 | Apologies for last week's gaffe, in which I mistakenly wrote that a degree of latitude was equal to 69.2 nautical miles, rather than the correct -- and very obvious, from a pilot's point of view -- 60 nautical miles. I'd initially worked out the calculations using both statute and nautical values, then deleted the wrong ones.
No wisecracks, please, about entering wrong coordinates into navigational computers, and I'd like to pre-answer a question that will, a few paragraphs from now, be sputtering from the lips of every smirking reader: No, the irony of having committed this mistake is not lost on me.
Further, according to reader Mark Brader, the reason Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the cities whose locations got this whole thing going, appear latitudinally juxtaposed on maps, has nothing to do with cartographic projection at all. Anytime lines of latitude remain parallel, Brader points out, there cannot be a north-to-south distortion. Brader says the problem is due merely to a slightly, consistently skewed placement of the black dots (or stars) used to mark the cities.
He also notes that neither Buenos Aires nor Montevideo are any closer to the "bottom of the earth," as was stated, than Atlanta or Los Angeles are to the top -- both straddling about 35 degrees from the equator in their respective hemispheres. What happens is, most of the earth's landmass exists north of the equator, and so many maps center their portrayals on about 15 degrees north latitude, deleting much of the planet's more southerly portions and making the horn of South America seem farther away.
Whether the result of funky cartographic projections or otherwise, Buenos Aires does, at the end of the day, appear south of Montevideo on most flat maps. Let's leave it at that, and never speak of great circles or map projections again. Deal?
Onward instead to other people's errors...
"Chinese Airlines Begin Holiday Service to Taiwan" ran the headline from a small Associated Press story dispatched nationwide two weekends ago. For the first time since 1949, when the two governments split amid civil war, mainland Chinese airlines have touched down on Taiwan. The goodwill charters were organized in celebration of the 2005 Lunar New Year. "An Air China Boeing 737, carrying about 300 passengers, traveled from Beijing to Taipei," the article states, "followed by a Hainan Airlines plane that took off from Guangzhou." In the spirit of reciprocity, "a jetliner flying for China Airlines took about 300 passengers to Beijing."
OK, a few things here: First and foremost, this story echoes the recent return of U.S. air service to Vietnam after a three-decade hiatus. Last month, United Airlines began daily flights between Hong Kong and Ho Chi Minh City. Maybe it sounds hokey, but these sort of touchingly reparative gestures are much of what make air travel, for all its duly noted miseries, special and important. Let's hope for more of them.
What I'd like to know, however, is how Air China got 300 people into a 737. Who knows what information may have been misunderstood or typoed, but the twin engine Boeing workhorse maxes out at roughly half that number. Some models have room for only about 120.
Not to be outdone, the Beijing-based China Daily's rendition of the same historic occasion describes one participating aircraft as a "Boeing 737-300 jumbo." The "jumbo" moniker, which I'm apt to admit is one the goofier qualifiers ever applied to a jetliner, is unofficially reserved for the 747, and not its little brother. Moreover the dash 300 variant is one of the smallest 737s.
China Daily further confuses us with this:
"A Boeing 777 airliner carrying 242 passengers soared into the early morning skies over Guangzhou en route for Taipei. Around 90 minutes later, a China Southern jet with a tail number CZ3097 became the first mainland plane to touch down on Taiwan island in 56 years."
Congrats for composing a more poetic and uplifting write-up than the button-down AP version. It also makes no sense. There are no aircraft in China -- either mainland or Taiwan -- with the tail number CZ3097. All Chinese registrations are prefixed with B, not CZ. To make sure, I looked up China Southern's roster, and it has no 777s with anything close to that tail number.
Ah, but CZ turns out to be China Southern's IATA identifier -- the two-letter code used to prefix flight numbers. (We ignore these codes in the States, but elsewhere flights are routinely designated in full alphanumeric format: BA205, SQ992, QF001.) In other words, it was flight CZ3097 that made history.
Incredible, yes? All of this esoteric critiquing, no doubt, strikes the average reader as picayune and worthless, but it does have a purpose, which is to point out the kinds of relentless inaccuracies that appear in virtually every media story about airplanes. The greater lesson being, perhaps, that if it happens with aviation, why not with coverage of medicine, law, armed conflict and so forth? Caveat lector.
Anyway, this time around I'm willing to let the errors slide and will not be filing formal complaints. Why? Because, to my great pleasure somebody managed to put together two complete articles about Chinese commercial aviation, brief as they were, without once mentioning "China Air," the world's most popular nonexistent airline.
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