Airline News
Mainland carriers report profit high
July 13th 2015
Profits for China's civil aviation industry reached a historic high in the first half of 2015, said Li Jiaxiang, chief of the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) at his mid-year teleconference in Beijing last week, adding its first-half profit had surpassed the results for the 2014 year. Read More »
CAAC statistics reported Mainland carriers had a total turnover volume of 40.51 billion tonne kilometres in first-half of 2015, up 14.5% year-on-year, while passenger and cargo traffic increased 12.5% and 6.6% to 210 million and 2.99 million tonnes, respectively. "International traffic grew faster than domestic, central and western China grew faster than east, and regional markets grew faster than the main routes. The imbalance of the market structure has been further eased," the aviation authority announced.
Analysts last week upgraded both China Eastern Airlines and China Southern Airlines stocks to “buy”. Boeing last week confirmed a China Eastern order for 50 B737NGs, valued at $4.6 billion at current list prices, for delivery between 2017 and 2019. The aircraft are expected to be operated by China United Airlines, a wholly-owned subsidiary of China Eastern Airlines, and other branches and subsidiaries of the Shanghai carrier.
The HNA Group continues working on multiple fronts for expansion as local media reports suggested Hainan Airlines is planning to open a long-haul base in Tianjin ahead of the launch of intercontinental flights to Vancouver and New York’s JFK from June 2016, with domestic traffic fed through its Tianjin Airlines subsidiary.
Hainan has filed applications with the CAAC to operate a daily B787-8 Pudong-Tianjin-JFK route, alongside five-weekly A330 Tianjin-Vancouver rotations. In related news, Air China last week said it would launch a four times a week Beijing-Newark B777-300ER service from October 26.
Another HNA subsidiary, cargo operator Yangtze River Express, has filed an application with the CAAC to expand its operations to include scheduled domestic passenger services. Separately, the CAAC has prohibited privately-owned Okay Airways from buying more aircraft and ordered it to reduce flying hours after it found 21 instances in which crew did not take enough time off and another 65 instances of pilots working overtime.
At press time, Tianjin-based Okay had a fleet of 15 B737s and 15 AVIC MA60 aircraft, operating mostly domestic services, as well as flights to Bangkok and Krabi.
China Aircraft Leasing Group Holdings has acquired 300,000 m² of land in the Harbin Airport Economic Zone to build an aircraft disassembly plant which it hopes to develop into the world’s largest such facility.
