Aviation & TESOL in China

Two aviation-related news items made front page news in China’s two English-language dailies last weekend. China Daily had the UFO story on page one and Global Times devoted a quarter of the front page to the solar plane story. Let’s begin with the latter…

For the first time in history, an aircraft powered solely by solar energy soared through the night. Andre Borschberg commanded the Solar Impulse on a 26-hour  flight and landed in Payerne, Switzerland. Prior to the flight, the Swiss plane’s 12,000 solar cells were charged for 14 hours. Flight director and former astronaut Claude Nicollier said “It’s a super flight.” Oh, those understated Swiss.

World Cup 2010 is over (Congrats, España! And for you six-degrees-of-separation theorists, Switzerland was the only team to have beaten Spain in this year’s Cup. Makes for a nice segueway…) but the impressions left by Yingli Green Energy remain. Yingli is World Cup’s first-ever Chinese sponsor, and the millions of dollars it spent to flash its name to the hundreds of millions of viewers during the Cup broadcasts was reportedly worth every penny.

Solar energy — as an industry, as a buzz term, as a discipline — is sizzling. Not too long ago, I read an investment article that likened energy stocks today to  internet stocks in the late 90s. While there is no craze accompanying the buying of energy stocks like the fanaticism we saw with dot-coms, the increases are said to be as sharp if not sharper. Now, if I could only get back the 40 grand I lost on aviation stocks…

Which one's the UFO?

Onto matters extraterrestrial. I wasn’t even going to write on this since I knew I wasn’t going to gather enough information, but seeing as how flight88.com visitor seenthing has reported on it and my sister back in LA has been asking me about it, well, I guess a blurb is in order.

Last Wednesday Hangzhou’s Xiaoshan airport was closed for several hours after a UFO sighting. Tower controllers detected the object and diverted inbound flights to Ningbo and Wuxi, while outbound flights were delayed for up to four hours. Witnesses described the object as “bright spot,” “yellow spot,” and “sparkling flashes of light.” A Chinese blogger who was publishing updates of the airport situation promptly had his site shut down by the government. At the time, an official said that the object had been identified and that information would be released on Friday (July 2), but by the weekend the word was “no conclusion has yet been drawn.” Two weeks ago, a UFO was reported over Urumqi but a local expert said that it was remnants of a missile fired by the US. (Didn’t say what the US was firing at, or where from.) As to who should bear the costs incurred by the cancellations and delays, which affected over 2,000 passengers, caused by the Hangzhou UFO, one insider said, assumedly with a straight face, “the owner of the unidentified object.”

Hmm… wonder if Bank of China can exchange ET currency for RMB…

NB Original post title was A Tale of Two Aircraft: One Unconventional, One Unidentified but I figured it was too long and the story was too short.

(Sources: AFP, China Daily, Global Times. Pictures: Uncredited, published in China Daily [top]; AFP [bottom])