One reaction to a hold-up at Shanghai’s main international airport this year caused a further 16-hour delay in itself, when 20 angry passengers invaded the runway and came within 200 metres of an oncoming plane from the United Arab Emirates.

In October, a mob of passengers held an Australian pilot hostage for six hours when their flight was diverted from Beijing to Shanghai because of bad weather.

They surrounded a Jetstar crew in a section of the arrivals area and refused to let them leave, fearing they would be left to find their own way home from Shanghai, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

The common complaint is that the airlines often leave delayed passengers in the dark about the situation.

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The C919 is designed to challenge Airbus (EAD.PA) and Boeing (BA.N) in the largest segment of the $100 billion annual jetliner market.

Tuesday’s orders for the 150-seat jet boosted the official tally to 380, reaching the state-owned manufacturer’s declared breakeven point of 300-400 orders.

However, Western analysts say it will be some time before the aircraft, due to make its maiden flight in 2014, proves both its technical worth and its financial viability.

“You can always build a jet — you can practically Google it, in fact,” said Virginia-based aerospace analyst Richard Aboulafia. “But the real skill is creating something the market wants and then selling and financing it.”

China is still largely dependent on other countries, such as Russia, for its military aircraft, but, according to AFP, a new stealth fighter jet has been revealed at the airshow:

Industry giant China Aviation Industry Corporation (AVIC) displayed its “Yi Long” drone, called Wing Loong in English, at the opening of China’s premier airshow in the southern city of Zhuhai, state media said.

AVIC, which makes both military and civil aircraft, also showed a model of a new generation fighter jet that Chinese media said was the J-31, a stealth plane whose existence was only recently known to the public.

The Chinese drone resembles the Predator manufactured by US-based General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, used by the US military, but is likely priced far more cheaply, Chang said, adding the Wing Loong had already been exported.

China’s first stealth fighter, the J-20, was unveiled in early 2011 but is not expected to enter service until 2018.

Aside from building commercial liners and stealth fighters, Chinese state media has announced that China will open up more airspace at lower altitudes, Xinhua reports:

China will carry out reforms next year to further open up low-altitude airspace to private airplanes with communication and surveillance facilities already built to ensure flight safety.

The announcement was made by Ma Xin, an official with the state air traffic control commission, at the 9th China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition that opened on Tuesday. The six-day event, in the southern city of Zhuhai in Guangdong Province, is attended by nearly 650 companies from 39 countries and regions.

Communication and surveilance facilities aimed to ensure low-altitude flight safety have been constructed in major districts of Changchun and Guangzhou and on the Hainan Island, according to Ma.

Opening the airspace is expected to promote China’s general aviation industry, including the purchase and use of private planes. There is potential for market growth in this area but it has been impeded by the country’s restrictions on airspace use.

Read more about China’s airline industry, via CDT.

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The engine financing plan is under high-level discussion in Beijing, said Zhao Yuxing, an official at the securities office of Shanghai-listed Xi’an Aero-Engine Plc (600893.SS), a key military engine-making unit of AVIC. “What we know is our company has been included in the strategic programme, which is designed to greatly develop and support the engine industry,” he said by phone from his company’s headquarters in the northwestern city of Xi’an.

Some Chinese aviation industry specialists forecast that Beijing will eventually spend up to 300 billion yuan on jet engine development over the next two decades.

“China’s aircraft engines have obviously been under-invested,” said Wang Tianyi, a defence sector analyst with Shanghai’s Orient Securities. “One hundred billion yuan is not a huge amount of money in the engine world.”

Foreign engine manufacturers including General Electric (GE.N), Snecma, a subsidiary of French aerospace group Safran (SAF.PA), Rolls Royce Plc (RR.L) and Pratt & Whitney – a unit of United Technology Corp (UTX.N), jealously guard their industrial secrets, limiting the transfer of know-how and opportunities for intellectual property theft.

While the priority has been put on building military aircraft, China’s aviation industry is also interested in building commercial aircraft. Despite the plan to expand the budget for engine research, China is still reliant on foreign companies for its commercial planes. Boeing, an American company, recently delivered a new jet to Air China, from China Daily:

Boeing Co formally delivered one of its 777-300ER jets to Air China, the nation’s flag carrier, at a ceremony on Monday at Seattle’s Future of Flight Aviation Center.

Chi Zhihang, vice-president and general manager of Air China North America, said the Boeing 777-300ER provides a better customer experience and offers more legroom for passengers.

The extended-range aircraft, which can fly up to 7,900 nautical miles (about 14,500 kilometers) before refueling, sports a distinctive paint job: Forty smiling faces of Chinese people adorn the exterior to honor the national aviation industry’s role in linking China to the world.

The airplane delivered Monday is the tenth of 19 Boeing 777-300ERs that Air China has ordered since 2008. The carrier received its first 777-300ER in the Chinese mainland in July 2011. Air China has been using the planes to expand routes, particularly in Europe.

See also China advances its aviation dream, via CDT.

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The China Southern Airlines flight CZ680, traveling from Istanbul to Beijing via Urumqi, was grounded in the Zhongchuan Airport in Lanzhou, capital of Northwest China’s Gansu province, hours after its take-off from Xinjiang’s capital of Urumqi.

The Boeing 757 took off again at around 10:45 pm at the airport after a four-hour-long security check found no explosives or any other suspected items.

An Internet user who claimed to be one of the passengers on the plane said she was not given any explanation before or after the landing.

“Without the maps app on my mobile phone, I would not even have known where I was,” said Baimifan at Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblogging website.

This incident comes amid tensions in Xinjiang and an ongoing crackdown on religious activities, including Ramadan earlier this year. According to AFP, the man allegedly responsible for the hoax is now under police custody:

Chinese police arrested a man in the restive northwestern region of Xinjiang for allegedly making a hoax threat that forced a plane into an emergency landing, state media said.

The man, whose name was only given as Wang, confessed to making a “fake terrorist threat” that led to the plane landing on Monday at an airport in Lanzhou, capital of northwest Gansu province, official news agency Xinhua said, citing security officials.

Resource-rich Xinjiang is home to roughly nine million people from the mostly Muslim Uighur ethnic minority who have long been angered by what many see as government oppression.

Such incidents on Chinese planes are rare, although a year ago a plane bound for Urumqi was forced into an emergency landing after a passenger claimed there was a bomb on board.

As fears over terrorist attacks from Uighur ethnic groups seem to be on the rise, Air China had delayed two flights due to unrelated security threats, the Washington Post adds:

Air China delayed two of its Beijing-bound flights to perform security checks Tuesday after it received threats shortly before they were scheduled to take off.

It did not describe the threats and said nothing abnormal was found.

The airline said on its official microblogging site that the planes were to take off from Lhasa and Nanchang.

Chinese media have reported at least four other incidents this year in which people fabricated threats — including bomb threats — against air travel for reasons such as blackmail, saving a romantic relationship, catching a flight or creating excitement.

See also Air China Turns Back After Threat, via CDT.

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“You have to take it a bit slowly, rather than being too aggressive and making enemies everywhere,” says Wang, founder and chairman of Shanghai-based Spring Airlines, of the approach that has enabled him to successfully carve out a piece of the $56 billion-a-year Chinese airline industry.

For Wang, one of the biggest obstacles to expanding has been resistance to his opening new routes from state-owned airlines.

Having learned from difficult experiences in the past – he was famously threatened with a 150,000 yuan fine in 2006 by a regulator in Shandong province for supposedly disrupting market order with promotional tickets selling for 1 yuan each – Wang now takes a more conciliatory approach.

“State-owned airlines have a longer history and are bigger in terms of capital size compared with privately owned airlines,” said Wang Jian, board secretary of Shanghai-based China Eastern. “In terms of routes, we don’t have direct competition (with Spring Airlines).”

While Chinese airlines are mostly state-owned, the aviation industry is one of China’s fastest growing sectors. According to Bloomberg, multiple airlines are gaining in the stock market:

PetroChina rebounded 1.1 percent to 8.96 yuan after falling to a record low yesterday on concern cuts in energy prices will hurt earnings. China, the world’s second-biggest oil consumer, will reduce gasoline and diesel prices for the third time since May after global crude costs tumbled.

“Investors are taking this opportunity to buy up the stock, hence the rebound,” said Li Xin, an analyst at Masterlink in Shanghai. The stock trades at 11.5 times estimated price earnings, compared with the five-year average of 17.1 and the record low of 10.89, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

China Eastern Airlines Co. led gains for airlines on the prospect lower fuel prices will boost earnings. Shares of the second-biggest domestic carrier climbed 2.6 percent to 4.35 yuan. Air China Ltd. (601111), the largest international airline, rose 2.4 percent to 6.35 yuan.

Although China Eastern Airlines and Air China have gained earnings, another Bloomberg article reports that China Southern Airlines may fall more than 50%:

China Southern Airlines Co. (1055), the nation’s biggest carrier by passengers, said first-half profit may fall more than 50 percent because of slowing economic growth and higher jetfuel prices.

Profit will drop from 2.76 billion yuan ($433 million) a year earlier, the Guangzhou-based company said in a statement today. The weakening of the Chinese currency against the U.S. dollar also caused foreign exchange losses, it said.

Credit Suisse said in a separate note to clients that it expects China Southern’s first-half profit to slump 98 percent to 46 million yuan as earnings are affected by a 13.4 percent jump in domestic fuel costs. The carrier’s profit in the first- quarter fell 74 percent.

China has allowed its currency to weaken this year amid slowing growth and Europe’s turmoil. The yuan fell 0.88 percent from April through June, the biggest quarterly decline since a dollar peg ended in 2005. Chinese Airlines typically hold dollar-denominated debts.

Read more about China’s airline industry, via CDT.

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Scientists found that the annual emissions reported by China’s 30 provinces in 2010 added up to 1.4 billion tonnes a year more than the total reported by its National Bureau of Statistics.

The gap between the provinces’ data and the national figure is equivalent to the entire annual emissions from Japan – the world’s fourth-largest emitter. It is 5 per cent of total global emissions.

The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, found the gap was mainly due to differences in reported levels of coal consumption in coal washing and manufacturing.

According to Washington Post, the difference between the national and provincial statistics is equivalent to the amount of all carbon emissions from Japan last year:

According to national-level statistics, Chinese carbon emissions grew at a 7.5 percent annual pace between 1997 and 2010, largely from coal use. But according to provincial statistics, emissions grew at an 8.5 percent pace. That’s a puzzling discrepancy, and it’s not clear which figure is actually correct.

The researchers, Dabo Guan, Zhu Liu, Yong Geng, Sören Lindner and Klaus Hubacek, come up with two possible explanations for the gap. The first is that the data is simply messy, due to the fact that many smaller Chinese firms are burning coal without the national government knowing about it. That might be due to shoddy record keeping. Or it might be due to black-market activity — small inefficient coal mines and coal-washing mills that were shuttered by the government and then quietly reopened elsewhere.

So it’s a mystery. But it’s a critical mystery. As the researchers note, it’s more difficult for scientists to model future climate change if they can’t be sure of how much carbon the world’s largest emitter is actually belching out. Right now, the International Energy Agency thinks we’re on pace to warm the planet by a staggering 6°C by the end of the century. But that’s based on China’s national-level data. What if the provincial-level data is correct and China’s emissions are actually 20 percent higher? Suddenly the picture looks even hotter.

Due to this discrepancy, climate change could be occurring faster than what was previously thought as well. The Guardian adds:

China has already overtaken the US as the world’s top greenhouse gas polluter, producing about a quarter of mankind’s carbon pollution that scientists say is heating the planet and triggering more extreme weather.

But pinning down an accurate total for China’s carbon emissions has long been a challenge because of doubts about the quality of its official energy use data. It is used to compute how the planet’s climate will change, helping plan for more extremes of drought, flood and the impact on crops.

Scientists say the world is already racing towards a warming of 2 degrees Celsius or more in coming decades because of the rapid growth in emissions from burning fossil fuels and deforestation. Adding another billion tonnes into computer models would accelerate the pace of expected warming.

On the other side of this debate, Professor Wang Yi of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing claimed that the figures from the government were actually overstated. Reuters reports:

But Wang said in an interview that research being conducted by his institute pointed to the opposite conclusion.

That is because the methodology used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a U.N. panel of climate scientists, does not take sufficient account of the big differences in calorific content of China’s many grades of coal, Wang said.

“We have some preliminary calculations and current emissions may be 10-20 percent less than the result based on IPCC methodology,” he said.

Even if the findings are confirmed, Wang said they would not change the bigger picture: China pumps out more carbon than any other country, about 22 percent of the global total.

In another article from Reuters, Chinese and European airlines are also disputing claims about CO2 and possible impounding of planes:

 China will take swift counter-measures that could include impounding European aircraft if the EU punishes Chinese airlines for not complying with its scheme to curb carbon emissions, the China Air Transport Association said on Tuesday.

Chinese airlines, which have been told by Beijing not to comply with the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme, refused to meet a March 31 deadline for submitting carbon emissions data.

A new stand-off looms after EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard said the carriers would have until the end of this week to submit their data or face enforcement action.

“Chinese airlines are unanimous on this. We won’t provide the data,” Wei Zhenzhong, secretary general of the China Air Transport Association, said on the sidelines of an International Air Transport Association (IATA) meeting in Beijing.

“We would not like to see a situation of ‘you hold up my planes and I hold yours’,” Wei said.

Read more about the environmental crisis, via CDT.

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The Chinese air regulator said China’s carriers are barred from paying the charges or other fees without government permission, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. It said Beijing will consider unspecified measures in response to protect Chinese companies.

There was no indication there would be any immediate impact on flights between China and Europe or penalties for Chinese airlines. The charges took effect in January but money will not be collected until next year.

The dispute highlights Beijing’s complicated status in global climate efforts.

China is the biggest source of climate-changing gases but as a developing country is exempt from Kyoto Protocol emission limits. Owners of Chinese power plants and factories have received billions of dollars from a European system that pays developing countries to curb emissions but Beijing has resisted binding limits.

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The inaugural flight of the first regular direct service between mainland China and Taiwan in almost six decades has landed at Taoyuan international airport, outside Taipei.

The China Southern Airlines Airbus A330, piloted by airline president Liu Shao-yong, touched down at 8.05am (10.05am AEST) with 100 mainland tourists among 258 passengers after a 100-minute flight from Guangzhou.

“This is a sacred moment. The two sides of the strait are like members in one family. Flying over the strait to Taiwan is like coming home. It feels good,” Liu said after landing.

Several fire engines splashed water over the aircraft when it was on the tarmac in a welcome gesture.

Read also FACTBOX: First regular Taiwan-China flights since 1949 take off from Reuters, Gov’t chiefs on historic flights to China
from The China Post and 1st weekend chartered flight with mainland tourists arrives in Taiwan from Xinhua.

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The first regularly scheduled flights in six decades linking China’s mainland with Taiwan will begin July 4, state-owned Air China said Tuesday.

The flights are part of a warming in relations between China and Taiwan, which split in 1949 amid civil war. The communist mainland claims the island as part of its territory and has threatened to attack.

The weekend flights will link Beijing with Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, and southern port of Kaohsiung, Air China said.

Read also A China Lifeline for Taiwan’s Airlines? by Chi-Chu Tschang, and Airlines in China, Taiwan Forge Deal from Wall Street Journal.

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Two major Chinese airlines plan to cut the number of international flights they offer due to spiralling fuel costs, at least temporarily, the carriers said Tuesday.

China Southern Airlines, the country’s top carrier in terms of fleet size, said it planned to suspend an unspecified number of flights to cut costs.

“Southern Airlines does have such plans because of the high fuel prices,” a Guangzhou-based spokesman told AFP.

“But we are just cutting a number of flights temporarily rather than halting service on these routes,” he added, without giving further details.

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China has threatened tough punishment for chronically late local airlines before this year’s Beijing Olympics.

The move by the Civil Aviation Administration of China comes amid concerns that badly strained airports and airlines may not be able to cope with the visitors expected to flood into Beijing and other cities for the Games, which open on August 8. [Full Text]

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From Reuters:

European plane-maker Airbus wants to source more parts from China and grab more market share from arch-foe Boeing in a market it expects to double every five to six years.

The firm owned by EADS, which edged ahead of Boeing this year in the annual race to chalk up more sales, plans to buy as much as $400 million worth of parts from Chinese manufacturers by 2015, Airbus China President Laurence Barron told the Reuters China Century Summit. [Full Text]

See also China Daily reporter Lu Haoting’s interview with Laurence Barron on why Airbus has partnered with Chinese manufacturers.

[Image: Laurence Barron, Airbus China president, shakes hands with Feng Zhijiang (right), president of Tianjin Port Free Trade Zone and Tianjin Airport Industrial Park Administrative Committee. From ChinaDaily.]

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Singapore Airlines and investment firm Temasek have bought a combined 24% stake in China Eastern Airlines.

Singapore will pay 4.7bn Hong Kong dollars (¬£298m) for a 15.7% share in the carrier, with Temasek spending 2.5bn HK$ for a 8.3% share….[Full Text]

[Image: Singapore is the world's largest airline by market capitalisation, via BBC]

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The mainland’s largest freight carrier Air China Ltd said yesterday it would not rule out the possibility of merging with rivals including China Southern Airlines to raise its competitiveness.

Air China President Cai Jianjiang made the remarks in response to speculation that the country’s three largest airlines might be restructured. Cai said the mainland’s aviation industry is looking into the issue, “but we have yet to make a submission to the central government to express our view”….[Full Text]

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A China Airlines plane with 157 passengers on board caught fire after its right engine burst into flames and spread to its left engine at Naha airport in Okinawa, Japan, a popular beach resort. The passengers and crew were evacuated safely, the Taipei-based airline said.

The engines of the Boeing Co. 737-800 caught fire at about 10:35 a.m. after the plane had landed and while it was taxiing to the gate, Johnson Sun, a spokesman for Taipei-based China Airlines said. Terrorism was ruled out as a cause, he said….[Full Text]

[Image from Bloomberg and BBC]
- Read also Xinhua’s coverage here and BBC’s report here

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