During the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20) period, China built or renovated 43 civil transport airports, bringing their number to 241, according to data from the Civil Aviation Administration of China.
The past five years also saw robust development of regional aviation hubs, with passenger throughput of airports in the central and western regions rising by 55.7 percent, 7.9 percentage points higher than the national growth rate. Across the country, the number of airports each with annual throughput exceeding 10 million passengers reached 39.
At the same time, airport services continuously improved. So far, 233 airports have introduced paperless travel model for domestic flights. At airports serving over 10 million passengers annually, more than 70 percent of domestic passengers now use self-service check-in machines. Flight on-time performance rate surpassed 80 percent for three consecutive years and hit 88.52 percent in 2020, up 20 percentage points from that at the end of 2015.
The past five years was a period when China’s civil aviation sector reported the best safety records and the biggest growth ever, said Feng Zhenglin, head of the CAAC.
During the 13th Five-Year Plan period, the entire sector achieved the 10th consecutive year of safe flight operation, and the total distance covered by domestic air routes reached 237,000 kilometers, up 38,000 km from the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15) period.
In 2020, China’s civil aviation sector was among the first to bounce back as the COVID-19 epidemic caused huge shocks to the global civil aviation market.
Total transport turnover of the sector reached 79.85 billion metric ton-kilometers, with cargo and mail volume hitting 6.77 million tons for the whole year. The number of passenger trips, which reached 420 million in 2020, has ranked second in the world for 10 straight years.
The sector will make more efforts to address weaknesses in infrastructure and advance key projects, striving to increase the number of transport airports to 247 by the end of this year and keep the punctuality rate of domestic passenger airlines above 80 percent throughout the year, Feng said.
