Results tagged “airport”

Cathay Pacific has given an apology and an upgrade to “Airport Auntie,” the hysterical older Chinese woman who had a complete breakdown in the Hong Kong International Airport after she missed her flight.

Is the air quality at the Beijing airport really that bad? The New York Times has the story (and some photos):

Could today's Beijing be what New York City was at the turn of the 20th Century? According to this article in Vanity Fair, there are certainly many similarities to draw upon. Kurt Andersen starts off noting the correspondences between population growth and development of city infrastructure. In 1904 New York's first subway line opened. Likewise, Beijing's new subway system is spreading out at a breathtaking pace (a point which subway fanatic and Beijingologist, David Feng, is unlikely to let us forget).

After a successful month running at reduced capacity, the new Terminal 2 at Pudong Airport took another 18 airlines under its wing today.

A summary of some of the Shanghai public-transportation-related stories making the news lately:
• An intelligent, wireless signaling and control system already successfully implemented on Lines 6, 8 and 9 will be used for all new lines built between now and the World Expo in 2010, theoretically cutting the lowest time between trains to 90 seconds.
• According to news reports, the new 3G cellphone network being rolled out in Shanghai has complete coverage on all metro lines and at the city's airports.
• The airport authority and police have printed up brochures explaining in Chinese and English what is allowed and not allowed to be brought onto airplanes under the new rules limiting gels and liquids in unchecked baggage.

Photo from Shanghai Daily.

The dire restaurant choices at Pudong Airport will get a boost when Terminal 2 opens on March 26.

Beijing Capital Airport's spanking new Terminal Three opens this Friday. The Norman Foster-designed building is being touted as the largest building in the world. And it is colossal. To give you an idea of just how big it is, the terminal is the size of 170 soccer fields put together, and that is 17 percent more floor space than all of London Heathrow's five terminals put together! The terminal is shaped like the character 人 which means people, and its design reminds one of the dragon, complete with 'scales' oriented south-east to capture as much of the winter sun as possible.

With passenger trials completed last month, and the third runway successfully tested yesterday, the new terminal at everyone's second favourite Shanghai airport looks all set for its grand opening on March 26.

From TMZ:

Photo from gruntzooki

By James Creegan

Okay, it may be the case that we don't fly enough, but yesterday at the Hongqiao Airport, we were really surprised to see this Virgin bookstore at the departure hall (that Richard Branson has really acted fast, hasn't he?). Does anyone know how long the store has been there? Food and beverage options appear to have widened up quite a bit too. Element Fresh has been there since last summer, located just outside the exit (sorry, no picture there), serving decent food at the same rates as their outlets elsewhere in town. With the competition, travellers are finally getting food that can actually be eaten, and prices also seem to have come down a bit on the average. In the meanwhile, we think the retail experience at Pudong Airport continues to rot away with its portfolio of Chinglish brand apparel stores and cafés that get away with serving bad coffee for RMB50. What do you frequent flyers out there think?

Thanks to the commenters on that last post, especially the one that alerted us to videos of the protests/marches that were on the Taiwan Youtube site. There were two that we found, embedded below. The first one is just a short clip of people walking around during the day. The second is from Xujiahui in the evening, with more chanting, from the evening of January 6. Oh yeah, and to the commenter who mentioned that we ought to put "alleged" in front of "health effects", you're probably right. If you're interested in learning a little about what health effects maglevs might have on people, you could try this Google scholar search. No definitive answers, but maybe a rudimentary way of glimpsing what is out there.

From Boxun.com (you need a proxy) we discovered that there was a maglev-related protest on January 6th. It first started around 11am, around the Xinzhuang/Minhang area, and was dispersed, only to form again sometime around 3pm, this time in the busy Xujiahui CBD. It managed to, in some form, last until 11pm. Protesters carried signs saying "out for a walk" (散步), while other chanted slogans about protecting their homes. The proposed maglev was to link the city's two airports as well as Shanghai to Hangzhou. However, recent protests brought public attention to the health effects of the maglev, leading, according to some, to the recent government decision to reroute the maglev so as to minimize the noise, radiation, and collateral damage. These proposed changes are part of the reason why the price estimates of the maglev have increased from 200 million per km to about 500 million per kilometer.

There has been plenty of criticism leveled at the Shanghai subway system, both on Shanghaiist and elsewhere, for things that could be better about it: it closes too early, the interchanges take too long, it's too crowded and too hot/cold, it doesn't reach XXX place, etc. If you fancy yourself on optimistic person, though, you know that one way to change the negatives into positives is to change your complaints into things you're looking forward to.

From Shanghai Daily:

SHANGHAI issued an orange alert for heavy fog this morning. It was the first orange fog warning since winter began early this month.

Continue reading "Orange fog alert and lousy airport/airline services"

By Julien Bertrand: On his first official visit to China, French President Nicolas Sarkozy must have been dizzy, witnessing the signing of contracts worth 20 billion euros in total, comprising of 160 Airbus aircrafts, two EPR nuclear reactors (to be built in Taishan, Guangdong, by 2014) and signal equipment for Shanghai’s future 36-kilometer metro line #10, a long-awaited deal between Alstom and Shanghai Metro that will link New Jiangwan Town to Hongqiao Airport. In an...

In other Shanghaiist news, our favourite media blog Danwei has offered your correspondent a very special Toilet Bowl Award as part of their recent Model Worker's Awards for "posting regularly about news that no one else is finding, and translating some of the more interesting stuff on the Chinese Internet". We have also been singled out for our "excellent contribution to the toilet sector, for the posts Shanghai artist's Nike poo, and especially for the video displayed at this page: New bidet that doubles as enema and colon cleanser." We wish we could take all the credit for it but the first story came in as a tip while the second one was a quite a boo-boo on our part. We've actually since unpublished the post (but somehow it still appears), reason being, one of our colleagues already wrote about it earlier this year. Anyhow, we shall graciously accept our toilet bowl and promise to polish it religiously.

Lost Laowai brings our attention to the following soundbyte of a conversation between an Air China pilot and the control tower of the JFK Airport in New York. In it, the pilot fails to understand anything that the traffic controller was saying and his English was so garbled that he might as well have been speaking in Esperanto -- a language that is deemed so important that China Radio International's website has a version in it!

Malaysia will help train Thai Muslim religious teachers and provide scholarships for students in southern Thailand as part of an agreement signed between the country's two leaders aimed at curbing violence in the region.

No shops or anything in there yet of course, but the ceiling and floor look finished, loads of check-in desks are almost ready to go, and there’s light and a/c all over the place. The usual rigorous Chinese quality control is being applied to the English signage.

Two days ago, Shandong Province's Yantai Airport was completely overwhelmed by floods -- the greatest it has ever seen -- and was forced to shut down. 45 flights were either cancelled or postponed. Heavy rains started at about 5am in the morning and within half an hour, the waters had risen to about 0.5 metre. This video has some pretty amazing footage of 25 staff pushing an aeroplane -- yes, you heard that right -- to safe ground. The departure hall of the airport was also completely flooded, and staff had to be deployed to use sandbags to protect the cargo area.

Following a successful flight from Shanghai to San Francisco, a body was discovered in the nose wheel well of United Airlines flight 858. Mechanics discovered the body during a routine post-flight inspection after the plane landed at 7:42am, Thursday morning. According to investigators, the man was of Chinese Asian descent and in his 50s.

Two bits of transportation news from random sources:

• 3 in US accused of enslaving Chinese acrobats
  Three men enslaved more than 20 Chinese acrobats, feeding and paying them little to work, and confiscating their passports and visas.


• 'Mass incidents' on rise as environment deteriorates
  Chinese people's refusal to accept an ever deteriorating environmental situation has resulted in a rising number of "mass incidents", the country's chief environment official said on Wednesday.


• Becoming Bill Gates' right-hand man
  Showing signs of genius even as a young boy, it was not surprising that Dr Zhang Yaqin would rise to become a right-hand man of the world's most powerful billionaire.

Air China has been hit by a spate of minor accidents lately. Yesterday flight CA941 (and that's a Boeing 767 you see in the picture), headed to Dubai from Beijing, was ready for takeoff with 148 passengers on board at about 5:15pm, when its "fore-undercarriage suddenly took back, leaving the plane nose on the ground". Ouch! Just two days before this though, yet another Air China flight (a Boeing 747 this time) had to make an emergency landing at the Los Angeles International Airport. The plane had just taken off when the captain reported a tire blowout. Thankfully there were no reports of injuries, although tire debris was found on the runway.

Hollywood actress Sharon Stone arrived in Shanghai late Tuesday night at Pudong International Airport. After passing immigration casually dressed in white slacks and a dark long-sleeved top, she was quickly driven downtown in a Mercedes Sedan to the JW Marriott Hotel.

We have whined before about the dearth of decent restaurants in Shanghai's airports. Pudong travelers are still better off brown-bagging it, but it seems relief will soon be on the way for domestic travelers: Element Fresh is opening up shop at Hongqiao Airport. From their website: