June 27, 1995

HE'S THE CHAIRMAN OF HIJACKERS' FAVOURITE AIRLINE

Eric Ellis, Xiamen

SPARE a thought, particularly if you are about to board an aircraft, for Chinese aviator Mr He Ping.

Mr He, chairman of Xiamen Airlines, is a man whose worst nightmare is geography. When he arrives at his office at Xiamen airport each morning, there is a good chance that one of his 14 aircraft will that day go missing.

Xiamen, formerly Amoy, is in the south of China's booming Fujian province, the ancestral home of up to 80 per cent of Taiwanese, and the closest mainland city to Taiwan. It was from here that many of the two million of Generalissimo Chang Kai-shek's Kuomintang followers fled with China's gold and treasures in 1948-49 before Mao Zedong's communist takeover.

Their heirs have since made Taiwan one of the world's richest places, a golden magnet for aspiring mainlanders who have turned it into the "Cuba of the 1990s", where every Chinese hijacker worth his AK-47 wants to fly to escape the mainland's harsh communist rule.

Mr He has lost five of his 14 planes over the past 18 months to hijackers, half the number of all Chinese flights seized by desperadoes wanting out.

Although he usually gets them back after a few days, hijacking plays havoc with his scheduling, his airline's image and, he fears, with his profits, as passengers use other carriers rather than make the unscheduled side-trip to Taipei.

"I am very angry about this," Mr He says. "I feel that the Taiwanese Government encourages this."

It was also a hijack that gave Mr He another dubious distinction of being the controller of the airline involved in China's worst plane crash - up until this month - when heroics on board a Xiamen Airlines flight ended up with it colliding with two other planes on the tarmac at Guangzhou airport.

More than 120 people died in the 1990 crash, surpassed only by the June 5 crash outside Xian that claimed about 160, including Sydney restaurateur Margaret Shen.

"We have not lost a plane through our own fault," says Mr He, whose name means "peace", a favourite of post-revolution parents.

Mr He hopes he will soon fly to Taiwan in more peaceful circumstances. His company has prepared the groundwork for flights to Taiwan, just 45 minutes away, hoping to service the 3,200 Taiwan companies that have invested some$US5 billion on the mainland.

At present, Taiwanese doing business in China have to fly to Hong Kong or Manila and then take another flight to China. The trip usually takes two days

With direct flights, Mr He reckons he could add another 20 per cent to his passenger tally. "We could fly there tomorrow if allowed, we have made the preparations but it will take three to six months at least," he said.

But his timetable has probably been put back due to the controversy that followed the mysterious deaths of 24 Taiwanese tourists in a boat fire at Hangzhou's Qiandao lake.

This month, China executed three men it claims was responsible for the tragedy and sees that as the end to the matter. Taiwan, however, sees it differently, suggesting that China is covering up the actions of an outof-control military.

It temporarily suspended cross-strait travel and is only now looking the other way when its people want to visit, and invest, in their ancestral home in the mainland's booming Fujian province.

But the question of cross-strait air travel is probably one of when rather than if.

A measure of the priority China has placed on it came recently when it appointed the Communist Party chief for Fujian, Mr Chen Guangyi, as boss of the national air administration and upgraded it to the responsibility of the State Council, China's cabinet.

Xiamen Airlines is one of the 27 airlines that have sprung up in China during its transformation to a market economy.

The new airlines are mostly a splintering of the national Central Aviation Administration of China, whose CAAC initials are often referred to as China Airlines Always Crashes.

Unfortunately, China lacks sufficient trained staff to deal with safety, security and technical matters. Many planes are flown by former and present air force pilots and it feels like it.

This correspondent has taken four internal flights in the past fortnight and the Boeing 737s were thrown around as if they were MiG fighters.

On the tarmac, workers smoke openly as planes are being refuelled.

At Haikou airport last week during a storm, the plastic raincoats Hainan Airlines staff handed out were discarded as passengers boarded and blew into the engines.