Air carriers to blame for delays

Military activities are said to be responsible for 7 percent of all civil aircraft delays, officials were quoted by the China News Service as saying on Saturday.

By far the biggest cause of flight delays, at 42 percent, is the management and operation of air carriers. This is followed by air traffic control, which results in 26 percent of delays, and weather, which claims 21 percent. Meanwhile, airport management is resonsible for just 4 percent, it was reported.

However, some industry insiders contacted by the Global Times on Sunday said there is little agreement on what causes the massive delays that have afflicted the growth of the country's aviation industry.

"The reason lies in the limited airspace for civil aviation," an unnamed captain from China Southern Airlines told the Global Times, adding that vying for airspace with the military further congests air traffic, intensifying the conflicts among air carriers, the aviation authority and passengers.

Some 80 percent of the airspace in China is either reserved for military use or under the military's control, while the remainder is left for the ever-expanding air industry, Su Ling, chairwoman of the labor union of the Air Traffic Management Bureau under the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), was quoted in Beijing News as saying.

"This is the opposite to the situation in the US, where 95 percent of airspace is in the hands of the civil aviation authority," the China Southern captain noted.

"I can understand the imbalanced distribution of airspace under the circumstances that the country needs it for air defense," Xu Ke, an expert specialized in aviation security with the Zhejiang Police College, told the Global Times. He added that, unlike China, the US shares airspace with Canada and can also use that of its Asian allies, such as Japan.

The State-owned plane maker Aviation Industry Corporation of China said with a sharp increase expected in the number of passenger jets in the country in the decades to come, the little available airspace will fall short of the actual demand.

Li Jiaxiang, head of the CAAC, also pledged to handle the massive delays by initiating measures including optimizing the schedule of flights, imposing a punishment on the airlines with low punctuality rate and revoking the flight number.

Military activities occasionally delay some flights but bad weather exerts more influence on punctuality, especially during summer, the unnamed captain said.

According to a CAAC report released in May, air carriers are to blame for most delays, followed by air traffic control. The report did not mention any military factor.