Nie Haisheng. (Photo by Zhu Jiutong)

　　"A round trip to the space, a dream of 5,000 years for the Chinese nation." When Yang Liwei aboarded "Shenzhou" 5, his comrade in arms Nie Haisheng, also one of China's first three-man team of astronauts intended to fly space trips, wrote this for the reporter with great enthusiasm.
　

　　In his boyhood, he dreamed growing a pair of wings

　　Nie Haisheng was born in 1964 in a small village of Yangdang town of Zaoyang, Hubei Province in Central China. In his boyhood, tuition was often a headache for his parents, who had to borrow money from others. Sometimes he gave teacher a rabbit for tuition instead of money.

　　Nie worked hard in his study. Though he had no money to buy textbooks, he learnt everything in the textbook by heart.

　　After graduation from junior high school, Nie entered the key senior high school of the county. Only two students in Yangdang town entered that key high school that year. Having learnt his economic difficulties, the school gave him some subsidy. On every vacation, he went to his cousin's home about ten miles away to do some manual labor, through which he could earn over ten yuan throughout the vacation. In this way, he earned his tuition for high school with his own hands.

　　Nie said he was fortunate that he met pilot recruitment on his graduation from high school. Being a pilot had been his dream. In his childhood, when he fell asleep on the hillside while herding cattle, he, who had never seen airplane before, had a strange dream, in which he had grown a pair of large wings and flew into the blue sky.

　　One day when someone from the people's armed forces department of the county came to his home for political examination, he realized he was really going to fly.

　　In the sky, he narrowly escaped from death

　　Nie thought he was born to fly. As the first pilot flying alone, the instructor asked him to tell his experiences to other students, he said only one sentence, "Think of nothing but flying."

　　On June 12, 1989, Nie began to fly a fighter plane and the next day he met with an accident.

　　He was going to fly to 4,000 meters high that day, when an explosion was heard outside the cabin and the engine stopped. In a split of a second, the rotating speed and height of the plane decreased while the temperature in the cabin soared. He reported to the ground calmly while trying to remove the malfunction.

　　All methods had been tried but the plane kept dropping. The ground commander let him bail out. However, Nie still wanted to have a try, wishing to pilot the plane back even with the slightest hope. He tried to make the plane glide but failed for the distance was too long.

　　By then, the plane was only 400-500 meters above the ground. The fast falling plane brought such huge overweight that it was hard to move a bit. At the last moment, he had to press the eject button. Then he was blackout and lost his consciousness.

　　When he opened his eyes, he found himself lying on a rice field while the plane had fallen into a valley over 100 meters away and exploded.

　　Later it was found that the accident was caused by a mechanical fault in the leaf of compressor in the engine. Since Nie had handled the dangerous situation with his good psychological quality and tried every means to save the plane, the Party committee of the troop honored him with third-class merit.

　　By Xi Qixin, Liu Cheng, Wu Chuansheng, Yang Yongzhen and Fan Juwei

　　(October 23, PLA Daily)