Recently, CAAC issued the Overall Plan for Civil Aviation Operations Support in Winter 2025 (hereinafter referred to as the Plan). Based on the complex meteorological conditions and operational support requirements in winter, the Plan aims to further strengthen industry-wide coordinated management and promote collaboration among all parties to ensure safe, stable and smooth operations of civil aviation during the year-end and beginning of the new year.
The Plan outlines three working principles for winter operations support: "Safety as the Foundation, Precise Assessment," "Targeted Measures, Dynamic Response," and "Collaborative Linkage, Closed-Loop Efficiency Improvement." These principles establish an end-to-end support system covering risk prevention and control, resource allocation, and multi-party collaboration. Regarding performance targets, the Plan specifies that from December 2025 to February 2026, the national average flight regularity rate should be no less than 88%, and the average departure delay time should be less than 8 minutes. Furthermore, the Plan sets strict control standards for the proportion of long delays, tarmac delays, and last-minute flight cancellations for airports handling over 10 million passengers annually and domestic passenger airlines. It explicitly requires preventing passenger group incidents caused by large-scale flight delays, thereby comprehensively enhancing operational quality.
The Plan puts forward eight core measures, including conducting seasonal transition preparations, improving capacity assessment, strengthening response to adverse weather, optimizing dynamic flight adjustments, coordinating operational organization and scheduling, enhancing delay information sharing, deepening service support collaboration, and conducting thorough review and summary. Corresponding implementation pathways are specified, featuring targeted, coordinated, and differentiated approaches.
The Plan requires CAAC regional administrations, airlines, airport companies, the Air Traffic Management Bureau, and other relevant entities to strictly implement their primary responsibilities and consolidate joint efforts by leveraging the "National-Regional-Airport" three-tier coordination mechanism. Regulatory authorities at all levels should strengthen whole-process supervision of key links, while all units need to optimize duty shift arrangements, so as to address winter operational challenges with targeted measures, enhance support effectiveness through collaborative coordination, and effectively safeguard aviation safety and the passenger travel experience.
