China's Hainan Airlines consolidates B737 fleet

Court labels HNA Group “discredited”, bans chief from travel

A court in China has officially designated heavily indebted Haikou-based conglomerate HNA Group as “discredited”, or laolai, a derogatory term for people or companies that fail to pay back money, the People's Daily newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China reported.

The Beilin District People's Court of Xi'an municipality in China's central Shaanxi Province also barred the group's chairman and legal representative Chen Feng from travel by air and high-speed train, taking holidays, and staying at star-rated hotels as part of an order to restrict his personal consumption.

The court's ruling was in retaliation for the group failing to pay CNY37,000 yuan (USD5,500) on time.

Chen has also been banned from buying real estate and high-premium insurance, from spending at nightclubs and golf clubs, and from allowing his children to attend private schools, the court papers from September 15 showed.

Such court-ordered bans in China do not have fixed time periods and there have been cases where they have been lifted after the defendants paid, Reuters reported.

The sum in...

China, US double weekly flight frequencies

Scheduled passenger traffic between the United States and China is set to increase after regulatory authorities on either side increased the market's weekly quota from four to eight flights.

The US Department of Transportation (DOT) said in a filing this week that effective August 18, its decision to permit Chinese carriers to operate, in the aggregate, a total of eight weekly round-trip scheduled passenger flights to and from the United States, mirrors that which the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) has permitted US carriers.

"On August 12, 2020, CAAC informed the Department that, pursuant to its June 4, 2020 Notice, United Airlines (UA, Chicago O'Hare) and Delta Air Lines (DL, Atlanta Hartsfield Jackson) qualified for additional flight frequencies," it said. "Per the terms of the Notice, United and Delta are now eligible to increase their respective frequency of service from two-times weekly to four-times weekly. CAAC and the other relevant Chinese authorities granted United and Delta the necessary operating permissions for these additional frequencies on August 17, 2020."

Although Xiamen Airlines...

Romania's Blue Air to resume B737-700 operations

US gov't rejects Chinese application for more flights

The United States Department of Transportation (DOT) has rejected Chinese carriers' latest applications to increase the number of flights between the two countries, ostensibly due to a lack of reciprocity on Beijing's part, Chinese investigative journal Caixin has reported.

According to a DOT order issued on July 30, applications for new frequencies to the US filed by China Eastern Airlines, China Southern Airlines, Hainan Airlines, Sichuan Airlines, and Xiamen Airlines were also rejected. The DOT also said that until further notice, all future proposed schedule filings by these airlines would also be rejected.

The DOT did not provide any explicit reasoning for the decision other than referring to the earlier order, which caps the number of aggregate weekly flights operated by Chinese airlines to the US at four.

The DOT is said to have been unwilling to permit more flights from China without an agreement with the authorities in Beijing. The US claims that China has blocked US carriers from adding more flights to the country.

Currently, the four-weekly-flight cap applies...