Western airlines cancel flights to China

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Western airlines are drastically cutting their flights to China as a combination of low demand and high costs of flying in Russian airspace weakens their competitiveness against domestic carriers.

British Airways announced this month that it would stop flying between London and Beijing from October. Just weeks earlier, Virgin Atlantic had decided to stop its only connection to China, Shanghai. The Australian airline Qantas is not affected by the closure of Russian airspace, but plans to cancel its route from Sydney to Shanghai. Its planes have been flying half empty at times, it says.

The withdrawal signals a change in attitudes toward China among some of the world’s leading airlines amid slowing economic growth in China and geopolitical tensions between Beijing and the United States and its allies.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, the country was seen as a growth opportunity for Western airlines looking to capitalize on the growing economy and increasing numbers of wealthy tourists.

But flight numbers plummeted during the pandemic, and while airlines began to redesign their schedules after borders reopened in 2023, they have signaled a renewed pullback in recent months.

Last year, BA said the Beijing route was “one of its most important” when it resumed flights after a three-year hiatus, and it was only in January that the airline began recruiting Mandarin-speaking staff. BA still flies to Shanghai and Hong Kong, but has halved the frequency to the former British territory this year.

The Chinese aviation market has been the slowest to recover from border closures during the pandemic. Travel will not resume in earnest until 2023 and demand on international routes is still much lower than in 2019.

However, for many airlines, the closure of Russian airspace is the main factor making the routes unprofitable, industry bosses said.

Russia has banned US and European airlines from flying over its territory in 2022, forcing them to make long diversions from their usual routes when flying to parts of East Asia.

This leads to higher fuel costs, which account for between 25 and 30 percent of operating costs, and has prompted airlines to complain that they are at a competitive disadvantage compared to Chinese airlines that continue to fly over Russia.

According to industry data provider OAG, the number of international airline flights from Europe and North America to China during the busy summer season fell by more than 60 percent from a peak of over 13,000 in 2018.

OAG data shows that Chinese airlines have reduced their flights on these routes by only 30 percent since their peak in 2019 and now offer more than twice as many connections on them in the summer as their Western competitors.

“If a Chinese airline flies over Russia, it has an unfair advantage over us,” said Ben Smith, CEO of Air France-KLM, last year.

In February, the U.S. government agreed to increase the number of direct round-trip flights between the U.S. and China from 35 to 50 per week. While that’s less than a sixth of the 325 flights per week before the pandemic, U.S. airlines have pressured Washington not to raise the cap any further, saying they can hardly compete with Chinese airlines.

“If the growth of the Chinese aviation market continues unchecked and without regard to market equity, flights will continue to be awarded to Chinese airlines at the expense of US workers and businesses,” industry lobby Airlines for America told US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in a letter published in April and seen by the Financial Times.

According to A4A data, demand for nonstop air travel between the US and China fell 76 percent in 2024 compared to 2019.

Edmond Rose, an aviation consultant and former executive at Virgin Atlantic who helped open the Shanghai route in 1999, said passenger numbers had not yet recovered to 2019 levels on those routes, which were already heavily dependent on Chinese tourists and students in the summer.

“It has always been much more seasonal than, for example, the transatlantic market, and that’s a problem because if you fly all year round, you’re bound to have lower load factors in the winter, at virtually the same cost,” Rose said.

The ability to fly over Russia would have allowed China’s major airlines to gain “significant” market share on routes to Western Europe, said Jason Sum, equity analyst at DBS.

According to OAG, Chinese airlines increased their scheduled flights to Europe by 16 percent to 14,835 during the summer season compared to 2019.

China Eastern launched direct flights from Shanghai to Marseille last month, while China Southern recently started flights from Guangzhou to Budapest. Chinese airlines have also secured additional slots at London’s Heathrow Airport this year.

Brendan Sobie, an independent aviation analyst based in Singapore, said Chinese airlines also hope to make better use of their wide-body aircraft as domestic travel suffers from China’s weaker economic growth.

David Yu, an aviation expert at NYU Shanghai, said the increase in Chinese airlines’ flights to Europe is in line with Beijing’s efforts to attract international visitors, including by granting visa-free entry to citizens of many European countries. “The ultimate vision is to bring more people back to China,” he said.

However, a Western airline executive said the declining popularity of flights between China and the West was a reflection of overall geopolitical tensions that had increased since 2019.

“The nature of China’s relations with the Western world has changed,” the manager said.