According to a forecast by Boeing, China is estimated to have, or rather will need, close to 6,000 planes by 2030. That is triple the number of aircraft in its fleet right now! Randy Tinseth, the vice president of marketing at Boeing's commercial airplane section says this is due to a growing economy, increasing personal wealth, and yadda yadda growth figures yadda yadda. 16% of the new planes are expected to be replacements for ageing aircraft, while the rest will just be "extra purchases." China air travel is booming - last year, a total of 267 million air passenger trips were recorded in the country, a 15.8% increase from the previous year. With this kind of continued growth, China is expected to be "the world's second-biggest aircraft market, after the U.S." more ›

Ah, homegrown engineers, how we love thee. We'd previously witnessed someone building their own homemade helicopter, so we guess news of a homemade airplane wasn't far along. This one was the result of 150,000RMB and six years of effort by a Chongqing Telecom officer named Peng Cong. What's most amazing, his salary is only 2000RMB a month, which means that he basically put every penny into making this plane. We wonder what he did for food. more ›

Shanghai Airlines passengers, upset at a 24-hour delay on a flight to Taiwan, decided to clog things up even more by staging a sit-in on the plane after it finally arrived at Taipei's Songshan Airport. Flight FM80Y departed Shanghai's Pudong International Airport on Saturday morning, but zipped around and returned to Shanghai right before it was supposed to have landed in Taipei. The pilot told passengers that the flight had been rerouted because of thunderstorms, but passengers insisted the pilot had flown back to Shanghai because "he was unhappy." A day later, when they finally got to the island, the passengers complained about the service attitude of Shanghai Airlines (which allegedly offered each one 400RMB in compensation), and refused to get off the plane in Taipei. After 30 minutes on the tarmac, Taiwan officials managed to persuade the protesters to leave. Strangely, this is not the first sit-in by Chinese airlines passengers we've heard of. Is this some new trend? Source: Taipei Times more ›

A lot of us over here have friends that we miss terribly over in the U.S., but our repeated pleas to have them come and visit are usually met with a sad shrug and something along the lines of, “We're in the middle of an economic crisis over here. I ain't got funds, man.” more ›

"An adult giant panda usually created 10 kilograms of faeces perday, however, now it only produced 2-3 kg because of scarce food, said Wang." more ›