(WSJ) China's sharp rise in air travel is compounding chronic flight delays here, making flying an ordeal for increasing numbers of airline passengers and threatening to choke growth in the country's booming aviation sector.
China's big three state-run airlines— Air China China Eastern Airlines and China Southern Airlines were the least punctual of the world's major carriers last year, according to aviation data firm OAG, with about one-third of their flights arriving late.
In the past three years, complaints about air travel rose sevenfold, the Civil Aviation Administration of China said. The agency didn't break out the most common complaints, but few doubt that delays are high on the list.
Flight delays happen everywhere and bad weather is usually the culprit. But in China, temporary setbacks caused by factors such as weather, smog, runway repairs and military drills are amplified by the way the country manages its airspace.
While China is building scores of new airports to increase capacity on the ground, three quarters of its airspace remains in the hands of the military, and is off-limits to civil airliners. The Chinese military has always controlled the country's airspace, and that hasn't changed despite the massive growth of civil aviation here over the past couple of decades.
It is a unique situation among major economies, which mostly adopt a flexible approach to airspace use. In the U.S., for example, large swaths of airspace can be commandeered by the military should the need arise, but they are open to civil traffic most of the time.
Europe recently overhauled its airspace rules to enable civil and military planes to share almost all the region's airspace. In India, 60% of airspace is open to civil airliners, and the government is in the process of opening more.
Similar reforms need to happen quickly in China, said aviation analyst John Grant.
China's airlines carried 488 million passengers last year, according to official figures, three times as many as a decade earlier.
In the air, "China is effectively using single-carriage roads, while the rest of the world is operating on four-lane highways," said Mr. Grant. "They're constantly squeezing more and more capacity into a small area of airspace."
With the problem becoming more acute, government leaders have signaled a change may be in the offing. "Airspace resources will be better allocated," Premier Li Keqiang said in his annual report to the National People's Congress in March.
Jane Sun, chief executive of travel services provider Ctrip.com International Ltd. , said her company supports the change but wasn't expecting major changes quickly, citing the challenge of wresting airspace away from China's military leaders.
Meanwhile, the Civil Aviation Administration of China says punctuality actually improved last year, and that over three quarters of flights were on time.
But it all depends what passes for "on time." Aircraft laden with passengers routinely spend one or two hours on the tarmac at Chinese airports, waiting for clearance to take off. But so long as the plane's cabin door is closed on schedule, the authorities chalk it up as an on-time departure.
Airlines are also quietly adjusting their schedules to improve their on-time ratings. In 2006 the average published flight time from Shanghai to Beijing was two hours and one minute, said Will Horton, a senior analyst at the CAPA Center for Aviation. It is now two hours and 18 minutes, giving airlines greater leeway to arrive on schedule.
China Southern said it operates within aviation authority guidelines. Air China and China Eastern didn't respond to requests for comment.
So far, tardiness doesn't appear to have dented the bottom line. China Southern, in which American Airlines Inc. bought a 2.68% stake for $200 million in March, said its 2016 profit increased by a third to $730 million. Air China's 2016 profit rose slightly to $985 million, while China Eastern's fell slightly to $652 million.
Despite those profits, China's airlines all have reported declining passenger yields for the past few years, suggesting that their growth has been underpinned by discounted fares that aviation analysts say may not be sustainable.
Cognizant of mounting fury from passengers—whose outbreaks appear regularly on Chinese social media—China's Ministry of Transport introduced new rules in January requiring airports and airlines to be more transparent about flight delays, ordering airlines to let passengers disembark if their plane has been stuck on the tarmac for three hours, and recommending that they offer compensation for lengthy holdups.
The new rules were of little help to Ling Jie, 46, who spent a recent Saturday morning stuck at Beijing Capital International Airport after Xiamen Airlines switched his flight to a smaller jet that couldn't fit everyone on board.
"It's not fair," the 46-year-old doctor said. "There's no proper explanation." A Xiamen representative said the replacement aircraft, brought in for technical reasons, reached Fuzhou just 45 minutes late.
But Mr. Ling didn't get a seat, and his flight to Fuzhou eventually departed 4½ hours late. In the future, he said he'd think twice before risking his holidays on China's unreliable airways.
"I'll more likely choose the high-speed train," he said.
Source: Wall Street Journal
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