China learns airline etiquette, the hard way

On Monday, West Air flight PN6272 was taxiing to the gate at Jiangbei Airport in Chongqing, China, when a passenger decided, for no discernible reason, to open an emergency exit door, thereby deploying the evacuation slide. His impulsiveness had precedent. Two days earlier, members of a tour group on a China Eastern flight in Kunming, furious over flight delays, pulled open emergency exits on their plane just as it was about to take off for Beijing. And their madness was preceded, in turn, by a Xiamen air passenger who on December 14 opened an emergency exit during taxi so that he might “get some fresh air.”

Taken alone, none of these incidents would rise to the level of news. Taken collectively, they suggest that China is facing a crisis of airborne sanity and civility. The Chinese government itself seems to have embraced that framing: the China’s National Tourism Administration has created a “National Uncivilized Traveler Record” that it now distributes to travel-related businesses around the country. (The group who opened emergency exits on January 10 has already been placed on it.) The most straightforward explanation for the crisis is that the Chinese public is simply inexperienced at flying.

Data assembled by Boeing shows that China’s total available seat kilometres — that is, the number of kilometres available to be flown by individual passengers — increased from 3.51 million to 8.7 billion between 1992 and 2012. And that’s just the start. The International Air Transport Association projects that China will surpass the US as the world’s largest passenger market by 2030. Making matters worse, China’s millions of new fliers are walking into airports at a time when civil aviation authorities and airlines are struggling to handle their numbers (while sharing limited airspace with a jealous Chinese air force), resulting in miserable delays that are consistently among the world’s most chronic.

Fortunately, time, more airports, and more experienced Chinese travellers will solve most of these problems. Others can be addressed by a simple commitment to treating passengers as long-term partners in China’s new aviation journey and educating them. No doubt there will still be occasional trouble in the air, but perhaps in time nobody will feel it’s worth covering.