A Quarter of all Chinese Commercial Flights Behind Schedule in 2010

The Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) issued a report yesterday which included details of the proportion of commercial flights that took off according to schedule. According to the report, of the 1,888,000 scheduled flights operated by the major commercial airlines last year, 75.8% departed on schedule, a drop of more than 5 percentage points on the rate recorded in 2009. According to the report, over 40% of the delay were put down to problems with the airlines themselves rather than weather or other factors. The CAAC report also claims that they received 1,334 complaints in 2010, 243 of which were legitimate - a drop of 35.4% on the number of legitimate complaints they received in 2009. These numbers appear to contradict the 89.3% increase in complaints related to flight services registered by the China Consumer Association in 2010.