As Hawaiian Airlines’ pilots begin flying this week to Beijing, their newest destination requires one cockpit item on the Airbus A330-200 that none of their other routes do: a metric conversion chart.

In all the other cities that Hawaiian serves, instructions for altitude clearance are given in feet measurements by the air traffic controllers. For Beijing Capital International Airport, they are given in meters.

"Our airplanes are set up for feet so we have to have a conversion table for something as old school as that," said Capt. Jonathan Lee, who is responsible for pilot training in the company’s new A330 full-motion flight simulator. "So we’re given the clearance, we look at this conversion table and we convert it to feet. And that has to be practiced because we’re not used to it. It’s a huge coordination among the four pilots on this flight that are going to be in the cockpit. All four pilots have to have that card out and any time we get an altitude clearance in meters we have to look it up on the table and set the feet into our instrumentation."

Hawaiian’s three-days-a-week service to Beijing was scheduled to start at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday. The 11-hour-and-40-minute flight from Honolulu to Beijing is the longest scheduled route in Hawaiian’s history. The second longest is Seoul at about 11 hours.

Lee said flying to China poses other challenges besides the metric conversion.

He said Hawaiian’s pilots face a language barrier even though International Civil Aviation Organization standards require that all air traffic controllers in the world know English.

"When they are actually giving us clearance they’re speaking English to our pilots or other English-speaking pilots such as at American or United," Lee said. "But they only speak Chinese to their domestic flights like Air China or China Eastern when they’re talking to them specifically. That makes our workload harder because part of our job is safety situational awareness. Our job is to see and avoid trouble. Instead it’s like we’re in a black box. We don’t know where other airplanes are except what it shows in our navigational displays."

Hawaiian also is cognizant that the Chinese military controls the majority of airspace around the country.

"We’re instructed we need to stay as close to the route as possible because of military restrictions," Lee said. "Where it becomes a problem is if we have to deviate for weather, like a thunderstorm. Then we have to get that clearance early enough from the Chinese controllers to deviate around the thunderstorm. Sometimes they won’t give it to us because their airspace is so tight. Then we may have to declare an emergency, but there still would be a certain protocol to follow."

While Hawaiian pilots weren’t able to take any training runs to Beijing, pilots have received a visual of Bejing thanks to the company’s $10 million A330 simulator housed in a warehouse near Honolulu Airport. The simulator, which was installed last summer, features 3-D satellite images of different major airport scenes, including Beijing, and various environments and landscapes including clouds, fog, storms, rain, snow, thunder, buildings, roads, bridges, trees and cityscapes. It also can create several levels of turbulence.

The simulator saves the airline about $3.6 million annually because it no longer has to send pilots to Miami to receive A330 training as it still does for those pilots flying Boeing 717s and Boeing 767s, according to Capt. Ken Rewick, vice president of flight operations for Hawaiian.

Pilots doing their initial training are required to be in the simulator 40 to 44 hours over a two-week period in addition to two to three weeks of ground training prior to the simulator. Recurrent training for pilots already flying A330s is 12 hours once a year. Of the more than 600 pilots at the company, close to half are in the A330 program now, Rewick said.

The simulator, which utilizes an electrical pneumatic motion (air) system, uses about one-third of the electric power that a hydraulic motion base would require, Rewick said.

Pilots also can get a feel in the simulator of what it is like to operate a heavy aircraft because Hawaiian needs to use more fuel for Beijing than any of its other flights.

"Our estimated fuel is about 184,000 pounds of gas to get there," Lee said. "That’s putting us at a total of 504,000 pounds of takeoff weight. That’s a very heavy aircraft, so our pilots can train and experience what it’s like to take off on a heavy aircraft like that. We’re typically taking off going to the West Coast with about 420,000 pounds, so almost 100,000 pounds less."

Lee said the terrain around Beijing Airport is flat with mountains near the Great Wall of China about 26 miles north of the airport.

"It’s kind of like a bowl near the airport," Lee said. "It’s almost like Vegas except it’s a bigger area. I think that’s why the smog just kind of sits there. They don’t have the wind to blow all that smog out."

If the visibility in Beijing gets too bad, Lee said the plane actually could land itself.

"This airplane could auto-land itself in bad weather and we may have to do an auto-land in Beijing depending how bad the weather is, how bad the smog is," Lee said. "But if it’s good weather, pilots love to fly and they love to land the airplane. So it’s always our challenge to give our passengers the best ride, a smooth ride and a safe flight altogether, and they step up to the challenge. So I would say that 99 percent of the time it’s the pilots doing the takeoffs and landings."