Beijing inaugurates the dial-a-copter scheme

Beijing has inaugurated its dial-a-copter scheme. It is a trial helicopter hailing service and has been jointly launched by a Chinese general aviation operator and China`s biggest taxi hailing platform. It has reportedly proved to be a great hit over the weekend.
This has been reported in zeenews.india.com dated 18 May 2015.

It seems over 10,000 applicants had signed-up for the helicopter service using Didi Kuaidi`s platform, but only 100 managed to hail a ride. It was a three-day trial run from May 15 and, while many did sign up, it was not possible to accommodate all of them.
The itinerary of the trip was a 230-Km Beijing-Tianjin round trip in a Bell-429 helicopter. The fare was 3,500 yuan ($560) per person, and the round trip to suburban Yanxi Lake was billed at 1,999 yuan ($321).
Incidentally, such a helicopter leisure flight is a new concept in China because, here, the military controls most of the airspace and the operators would have to apply for regulatory approval for tours one day in advance.
(Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org)

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Alibaba to deliver ginger tea in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou using drones

#alibaba #drones #gingertea #jackma Alibaba, the biggest internet retailer of China wants to replace delivery boys with quadcopter drones and has started testing drone-based deliveries to hundreds of customers in the cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou as reported in bbc.com dated 4 February 2015.
The trial will continue for three days and would be restricted to locations that fall within a one-hour flight of its distribution centers. Alibaba would confine its trials to using drones to deliver orders for a specific type of ginger tea, the maximum weight of the packages would be to 340g (12oz).
The experiment was being undertaken by Alibaba's Taobao division which is an eBay-like marketplace that connects third-party sellers and buyers – the exercise would involve 450 shoppers.
Obviously, Alibaba is following in the footsteps of Amazon, Google and parcel service UPS which have begun to conduct trials of such aircraft.
Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba has ambitions of global expansion and wants to reach out to two billion customers worldwide by 2025.
Of course, using drones instead of delivery boys does have its drawbacks – one factor is that drones can successfully fly above the tree line but, nearer ground level, it would have to encounter moving obstacles like children, vehicles and pets when they come to land below the roof of your house. That would need more study and expertise.

It is officially declared that the loss of MH370 was due to an accident

#MH370 #flightdatarecorder The Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 with 329 people on board that had vanished soon after takeoff from Kuala Lumpur is being treated as an accident and everybody on board is presumed to be dead. This is after 327 days from the incident.
This announcement has now cleared the way for the company to pay compensation to families. Of course, some relatives of victims believe there is still a chance their loved ones may be alive and several relatives could not accept the decision.
Civil aviation chief, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, has indicated that the search effort had followed up every credible lead and reviewed all available data, but was unable to locate the plane and has assured that the hunt for the wreckage would continue.
Azharuddin has added that the absence of any physical evidence, especially the flight recorders, would mean that there was nothing to speculate on the cause of the disappearance. He has indicated that an interim statement on the investigation would be made public on or around the first anniversary of the accident.
It may be recalled that the Boeing lost contact with air traffic control shortly after take-off from Kuala Lumpur en-route to Beijing on 8 March last year and this remains one of aviation’s biggest mysteries till date.

Chinese wines are superb – target is nine million bottles

#chinesewines China has entered the winemaking industry and its products have caught the fancy of connoisseurs. The location of this unique industry is a 10-hour drive northeast of Beijing in the province of Liaoning Province.
Its outside temperature is in the region of -15C and one cannot expect to come across any multimillion pound wine industry in such a place but that is what the Chinese have done. In the villages, there are snowy scenery and row upon row of vines and is known as China's "ice wine" country. The Chinese have gone all out to make this a success and it has helped transform the local economy.
The quality of the Chinese have impressed wine merchants six thousand miles away in London – here wine merchants have started to stock a range of Chinese wine. The Master of Wine at a premium outlet has agreed that Chinese wine has transformed in quality in recent years. The really expensive black label version sells at £65 per half bottle and the gold label at £19 - both are excellent and very competitive at that price.
As one of the managers has revealed, seven million bottles were produced this year and, for next year, the target would be nine million.

China’s craze for ivory has killed 100,000 African elephants in last three years

China is crazy for ivory and in order to whet its appetite, thousands of elephants are being killed every year. The price for the precious ivory goods have surged in China, as has the number of poached elephants.
As indicated by Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder of Save the Elephants, nearly 100,000 African elephants have been killed for their ivory in just the past three years and that is a dangerous trend. In his opinion, the African elephants could disappear from the wild within a generation if China does not mend its ways and takes action to put an end the sale of ivory.
This greed for ivory luxury goods have been fueled by the nouveau-riche Chinese consumers who have developed a taste for such exotic items. The wholesale price of raw tusks has tripled in just four years since 2010, whereas the retail prices for finished ivory have increased exponentially.
Incidentally, the retail prices in Beijing have increased more than 13 times since 2002. The teams of researchers had visited 275 retail outlets in Beijing and Shanghai and discovered that the number of illegal shops far outnumbers the number of legal ones. On a rough estimate, at least 78% of the ivory shops in Beijing were illegal, while in Shanghai it was at least 89%.