Years ago, my father in law ( a heavy jet mechanic) got sent to China for two months as part of a team to diagnose and fix a recurring dutch roll complaint on a particular airframe. This was for a A300-series flown by a large freight carrier.
The local mechanics couldn’t figure it out, so this team was assembled from the mechanics at headquarters to fix the plane.
They inspected the plane and found no damage. They had the pilots make multiple test flights - they could not reproduce the problem. The pilots were adamant that the plane was broken. Engineers from Airbus ended up flying out to assist. They couldn’t identify any problems.
After a few months of effort and a lot of very expensive dart throwing and parts swapping, they gave up. As far as anyone could tell, there was never anything wrong with the plane, and based on comments overheard from the pilots, they simply did not like this particular plane. It had been pulled from a boneyard and recertified, and they considered flying it beneath them.
FIL did come home with some cuban cigars and really high quality counterfeit Fluke multimeters he got from the local market, though.
I think this was way more calculated than that. They made up an issue they knew would be taken very seriously and that would be difficult - in the best of circumstances - to disprove.
I suspect the face saving culture is holding China back significantly since it adds a ton of noise to interpersonal signal propagation. I wonder if the government is doing anything social engineering-y to try to reduce it?
The government is among the worst of the culprits. “We’re being accused of doing a bad thing? I know! Arrest the speaker and erase it from our version of the Internet!”
That isn’t true though. All presidents launch anti corruption campaigns to solidify their power when they start. Xi did it, Hu did it, Jiang did it, I bet Deng did it (although the office was merged yet, he was at least supreme leader). When they are all corrupt, it is easy to (a) clean house of people you don’t like (b) protect and promote your supporters and (c) scare lots of monkeys by killing lots of chickens.
The CPC always admitted there was corruption, to do otherwise would simply lose credibility with people. Given that Xi is now president for life, the corruption should simply be accumulating now since the 10 year house cleaning cycle has been broken.
> and really high quality counterfeit Fluke multimeters he got from the local market, though.
I got one of those years ago. Wouldn't trust it on any industrial shit but I've used it for residential electrical tinkering (plus smaller projects) for years, works great and has never had a single issue.
These were used for mechanic-y stuff like basic voltage and circuit draw tests. They were fine for that, and the main benefit was that they were made with oil/solvent resistant coatings on the meter body and leads.
The local mechanics couldn’t figure it out, so this team was assembled from the mechanics at headquarters to fix the plane.
They inspected the plane and found no damage. They had the pilots make multiple test flights - they could not reproduce the problem. The pilots were adamant that the plane was broken. Engineers from Airbus ended up flying out to assist. They couldn’t identify any problems.
After a few months of effort and a lot of very expensive dart throwing and parts swapping, they gave up. As far as anyone could tell, there was never anything wrong with the plane, and based on comments overheard from the pilots, they simply did not like this particular plane. It had been pulled from a boneyard and recertified, and they considered flying it beneath them.
FIL did come home with some cuban cigars and really high quality counterfeit Fluke multimeters he got from the local market, though.