Kunpeng Airlines will be the latest Chinese airline to fall more directly under government control after the Henan provincial government agreed to recapitalize it this month. The investment is part of a broad trend in which Chinese provinces and cities are buying into airlines that, typically, are adopting the geographic name of their new government owner. In the case of Kunpeng, set up two years ago by Shenzhen Airlines and Mesa Airlines of the U.S., the new name will be Henan Airlines, according to state media reports.

China’s specialist builder of large military and civil airplanes, Avic Aircraft, will become a publicly traded company by 2011, using a subsidiary for a backdoor stock market listing. Restructuring of the company’s assets will be done by the first quarter of 2010, says General Manager Hu Xiaofeng. Assets worth 8 billion yuan (US$1.2 billion) will be moved into the subsidiary, Xi’an Aircraft International Corp., a listed unit of Xi’an Aircraft.

Qian Xuesen, a U.S.-trained rocket scientist who became the father of the Chinese space program, died on Oct. 31, aged 98. Qian, whose name is sometimes spelled as Tsien Hsue-shen, was born in Hangzhou, China, moved to the United States in 1935 and became an early researcher in rocketry. During and immediately after World War Two, the sudden importance of jet propulsion and rocketry in catapulted him to the highest levels of the U.S. military scientific establishment, even though he was a foreigner.