A Beijing-bound flight from Shanghai landed at its origin more than 17 hours after the journey began, as severe thunderstorms at its destination forced the aircraft to turn back twice.
Flight MU5331 on an Airbus A330-300 aircraft flown by China Eastern Airlines took off from Shanghai’s Hongqiao airport at 2:11am on Monday after a five-hour delay, bound for the Chinese capital. The commuter service, carrying 250 passengers, was delayed due to inclement weather in Beijing, which reduced the Capital International Airport’s navigability to less than 50 per cent, forcing more than 400 flights to be cancelled.About 100km from its destination, MU5331 made a U-turn and returned to Shanghai, landing at Pudong airport on the eastern side of the city across the Huangpu River at 4:59am, according to data provided by Umetrip, a mobile application that provides flight information.
Six hours later, the flight took off again at 11:13am for Beijing, but was turned back a second time due to a thunderstorm warning, landing back at Hongqiao at 2:26pm on Monday, more than 17 hours after the journey began.
Chinese airlines and airfields frequently rank among the world’s least reliable for being on time, as severe constraints in capacity and aggressive management by air traffic control – the air space is shared by the civilian aviation authority and the air force – often wreck havoc on schedules. But flight MU5331 was an extreme example.“Passengers can blame the extreme weather” for the service disruption, said Zheng Honggang, the chief executive of Shanghai-based Kate Travel, echoing a statement issued by the carrier based in the same city. “But air traffic control that causes frequent flight delays on the Chinese mainland often provokes ire among passengers.”
Interactive Infographics: Why the world’s flight paths are such a mess
Chinese travellers had been spending more time at airports and on aircraft as delays worsened, with the average waiting time in 2015 at 21 minutes – two minutes longer than in 2014 – according to a survey conducted that year by the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC).At its worst, Pudong’s on-time departure rate was 51 per cent, which meant one in every two flights could not take off within 30 minutes of the scheduled departure. It ranked alongside Hangzhou and Tianjin as the three worst airports among 48 surveyed in China, according to the CAAC. Hongqiao, the original Shanghai airport, was a star performer by comparison, with an on-time departure rate of 68 per cent, or two in every three flights.
Traffic congestion had also worsened as the handling capacity at airports failed to keep pace with the explosive growth in air travel and airline fleets. About 436.2 million people travelled by air in 2015 – 11.3 per cent more than a year earlier, according to the CAAC.
China’s urbanisation drive has ushered in growing demand for air travels with Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, the state-owned passenger jet maker, predicting that the mainland would require 6,865 new aircraft over the next 20 years valued at 6 trillion yuan (US$870.8 billion) as airlines replenish their retiring fleets or expand.
In the Chinese government’s 13th Five-Year Plan between 2016 and 2020, the country will add 43 new airports across the nation.
The US$12.9 billion Daxing mega airport has just been completed in a southern suburb of Beijing that can accommodate as many as 100 million passengers annually, with the existing and new airports likely to share 170 million travellers a year by 2025, according to official estimates.Punctuality has also improved at Shanghai’s two commercial airports. Pudong’s on-time departure rate improved last year to 73.1 per cent, an increase of 24.8 percentage points from 2017, while Hongqiao’s on-time rate rose by 27.5 percentage points to 78.4 per cent.
For the passengers of flight MU5331, the improvements did not help. The flight was ultimately cancelled, and passengers were reassigned to different flight for Beijing, or compensated to get to their destination by high-speed railway.
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Shanghai to Shanghai in 17 hours: the perils of mainland air travel
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tK%2FMqWWcp51kr7a%2FyKecrKtfmLyuvMCnoJ6rX5a%2FtbXCpZxoa2BnfXeDkGiZnqGanruoedOhrKeclafAtbvRpqpmqpWpwrO6jJyfoqaRYrKiv9OeqaerXZu5qrPHrWSmrWVogHJ507CgnJ0%3D