On October 15, CAAC held a monthly press conference to share information on the overall safety of civil aviation, the development of transport and general aviation, and infrastructure construction during the 13th Five-Year Plan period, as well as the safe operation of civil aviation in September. Since the beginning of the 13th Five-Year Plan period, China’s civil aviation industry has achieved outstanding achievements in safety, scale, efficiency and service, with its strategic role continuing to grow, and the all-round reform has been crowned with success. The goal of building China into a civil aviation power was largely achieved. More than 40 mainstream media participated in the online press conference.

During the 13th Five-Year Plan period,CAAC maintained the strategic focus of “controlling the total size and adjusting the structure”, which allowed the industry to achieve stable growth while making further progress. Deputy Director General of the Office of Aviation Safety Qiao Yibin introduced in the teleconference that as of the end of June this year, China’s civil aviation industry had realized 47.42 million hours of transport flights and 19.41 million flight movements, an increase of 55.6% and 43.1% respectively over the same period of the 12th Five-Year Plan; the 5-year rolling value of the major transport accident rate per one million hours stood at 0, which was better than the safety goal and the world average; and there were no major aircraft or ground accidents caused by unlawful interference. By the end of September this year, transport aviation across China has operated safely for 10 years and 1 month, or a total of 86.69 million flight hours, and has assured aviation security for 18 consecutive years. In addition, the building of civil aviation governance system has been steadily promoted: the governance capabilities kept getting better; the reforms yielded evident results; and the basic support became stronger. Especially since the beginning of this year, the whole industry has adhered to the working requirements of “three preventions” and “four guarantees”, and has coordinated efforts to prevent and control the pandemic and secure civil aviation safety, therefore ensuring stable and controllable safety performance of civil aviation.

During the 13th Five-Year Plan period, development was promoted in both transport aviation and general aviation. According to Shang Kejia, Deputy Director General of the Air Transport Department of CAAC, as of the end of 2019, the industry had completed a total transport turnover of 129.3 billion ton-kilometers, continuing to rank second in the world since 2005, with an average annual growth rate of 11%; transported 660 million passengers, and 7.53 million tons of mail and cargo, with a respective average annual increase of 10.7% and 4.6%. In particular, the proportion of passenger turnover in the national comprehensive transport system had increased year by year from 24.2% at the end of the 12th Five-Year Plan period to 33.1%. CAAC has taken hub construction as the lead to actively serve the national strategy and support local socio-economic development, and by the end of 2019, 234 domestic cities were served by scheduled flights. International air traffic right resources were optimized and quantified to encourage and guide airlines to expand the international market, and by the end of 2019, flights had been launched to 167 cities in 65 overseas countries to serve the Belt and Road Initiative. As of the end of 2019, Chinese airlines had launched 520 international routes with 47 Belt and Road countries, making the route network more and more complete. Special campaigns were conducted continuously to improve service quality. In 2018, the national flight regularity rate broke the historical record since 2010, and exceeded 80% for two consecutive years; convenient measures such as paperless travel and better ticket purchase environment, catering qualities, passenger complaint channels, and baggage transport conditions have achieved practical results, and passenger satisfaction has been significantly improved. General aviation, under the guidance of national policies, has welcomed its new opportunities and prospects, and achieved phased results in innovative trial projects. The classified management and the reform of general aviation to delegate power, strengthen management and improve service have gained all-round results. Up to now, the number of traditional general aviation companies has increased by 81.1% compared with the end of the 12th Five-Year Plan period, with the fleet size expanding by 30.3%. At the same time, unmanned aviation has developed rapidly, with more than 9,700 UAS companies registered online for general aviation operations, and more than 120,000 registered commercial drones.

According to Bao Yi, Deputy Director General of the Development Planning Department of CAAC, during the 13th Five-Year Plan period, CAAC seized opportunities to steadily promote infrastructure construction, to better support the high-quality development of the industry. A modern airport system comprising 3 world-class airport clusters, 10 international aviation hubs, 29 regional hubs and other transport airports was set up. It is estimated that by the end of the 13th Five-Year Plan period, 43 airports will be newly built or relocated, including Beijing Daxing International Airport which was completed and put into operation last year, and Chengdu Tianfu International Airport which will soon be completed; the number of transport airports nationwide will increase to 241, and the number of certified general airports will reach 313. Among those airports, 50 are located in the western region, border areas or poverty-stricken areas, in order to better serve national strategies such as winning the fight against poverty, promoting large-scale development in the western region, and boosting development in the border regions to benefit the people living there.

In addition, Qiao Yibin introduced the performance of civil aviation nationwide in September this year. In this month, transport aviation recovered to 87.8% of the same period last year, an increase of 2.0% month-on-month; general aviation increased 12.4% year-on-year and 1.6% month-on-month. No accidents were recorded. In September, the total turnover of domestic routes recovered to 96.9% of the same period in the previous year; a total of 47.75 million passengers were transported on domestic routes, which was 98.0% of the traffic transported in the same period last year, and the number of domestic passenger flights reached 103.5% of the same period last year; cargo and mail transport reached 665,000 tons, which was 96.4% of the same period in 2019; domestic, as well as Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan cargo flights were all about 1.3 times of the same period last year; international cargo flights were 2.5 fold of the same period last year. The volume of cargo and mail transported by all-cargo aircraft continued to maintain rapid growth, with a year-on-year increase of 29.9%; a total of nearly 600,000 movements were handled by 39 domestic airports with a capacity of handling over ten million passengers a year, reaching 90.9% of the same period last year. Among them, 11 airports including Sanya, Lanzhou, etc. exceeded the traffic last year. The national flight regularity rate was 81.1%, an increase of 3.0 percentage points from the previous month.