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China Southern is one of China's fastest growing and most progressive airlines with domestic services and international flights to Bangkok, Hongkong, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur and Manila. This 777 is the first of six it has on order.
The Booming Chinese Airline Industry
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The Long March
The Booming Chinese Airline Industry
Strapped in a comfortable business class seat and awaiting pushback, one cannot fail to be impressed with the vast array of new and diverse aircraft passing us on the ramp.
Brand new 747-400s, MD-11s and A300-600s pull into new aerobridges to disgorge hundreds of passengers at a time. Sitting unobtrusively on a corner of the tarmac is the first McDonnell Douglas MD-90, freshly painted in the colours of the launch customer Delta Air Lines. Within days, this same airport will play host to the new Boeing 777 in United Airlines livery. This is not JFK, Schiphol or London Heathrow but Shanghai Airport, which lies on the outskirts of the booming city spearheading the economic boom engulfing China today.
There are two significant ironies evident. Firstly it seems odd to see such capitalist tools as western commercial jets flying for the national airlines of China. Although the USSR lies in tatters and communism is apparently relegated to the pages of history, China remains (superficially at least) a socialist state. Chairman Deng has had many detractors in recent years but it must be remembered that he also had the foresight to allow China to embrace certain aspects of the free market. Such is the industriousness of these people, that perhaps any other approach would have been doomed to failure. The ramifications of this interesting capitalist/socialist cocktail are subject to much of the attention of the world’s press, but one thing is clear – it has allowed aviation in China to boom. The old Civil Aviation Administration of China was once the sole provider of airline services in a country bigger than Australia. Sensibly it has been divided into regional airlines, and it is these airlines which are the object of almost fanatical interest from the ‘big three’ aircraft manufacturers.
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