Model Airplanes

China’s political leaders identified aerospace as one of 10-key industries in the country’s quest to become an advanced industrialized nation. Ahead of this weekend’s annual legislative session, Western planemakers – their future competitors – are helping them toward that goal.

Airbus Group SE will break ground Wednesday on a finishing center for its wide-body A330 jets in Tianjin, near Beijing, a decade after it opened an assembly plant there for single-aisle planes. Chicago-based Boeing Co. also is seeking a location in China for a plane-completion facility.

Opening plants in China, poised to become the world’s largest aerospace and air-travel market in two decades, is as much a political as an economic decision. One factor is proximity to customers: Chinese airlines order billions of dollars of planes from Airbus and Boeing every year, and doing some assembly locally eases the strain on the planemakers’ existing facilities. Equally important is the goodwill such investments earn.

“It’s absolutely undeniable there’s been a communication of Chinese expectations for companies to build in China, to provide jobs in China, that they will be treated less equitably otherwise,” said Scott Harold, the Washington-based associate director of Rand Corp.’s Center for Asia Pacific Policy. “If you build in China, you’re a ‘friend’ of China.”

Aerospace was one of 10 sectors highlighted in the “Made in China 2025″ blueprint released at last year’s meeting of the National People’s Congress. China also

Article source: http://www.mb.com.ph/airbus-boeing-see-politics-makes-business-sense-in-china/

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared almost exactly two years ago, but apart from a barnacle-covered flaperon that washed up on the tiny island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean last July, no other parts — let alone the aircraft itself — have been found. But now authorities think they may have recovered another piece. A blogger who’d been following the search for MH370 apparently found an aircraft part off the coast of Mozambique, and investigators believe it belongs to a Boeing 777, the same model as the missing jet.

The investigation has included more than a few misdirects — and two unintentional discoveries of shipwrecks — but this new piece of debris was discovered in the same southern–Indian Ocean neighborhood where officials pulled ashore the flaperon last summer. Specifically, the piece washed up on a sandbank in the Mozambique Channel, a body of water that separates the African state from the island of Madagascar. La Réunion is off the eastern coast of Madagascar. 

According to NBC News, the debris discovered displays the words “NO STEP” and might be part of a horizontal stabilizer, which is the small winglike structure on either side of the jet’s tail. Officials who are part of the search operations haven’t confirmed anything yet, and Boeing has not commented on whether the piece belongs to a 777 or not. The fragment is now on its way to Malaysia, where investigators will try to see if they really have found one more clue. 

Article source: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/03/another-part-of-mh370-may-have-washed-up.html