Shanghai’s Airports to Restart International Flights Tomorrow from buzai232's blog

Shanghai’s Airports to Restart International Flights Tomorrow

Shanghai’s airports will fully re-open tomorrow as the city’s two-month-long lockdown due to an outbreak of Covid-19 is finally lifted. The passenger load factor for international flights, which refers to the proportion of seats filled, has been raised to 60 percent from the previous 40 percent, several foreign airlines told Yicai Global.To get more shanghai airport latest news, you can visit shine news official website.

From tomorrow, the normal operations of the city’s railways and airports will be resumed, the municipal government said today.

Around 80 percent of regular flights have already been scheduled for the first two weeks of June, according to data from aviation software Flight Master. Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport has arranged 7,716 flights and Shanghai Pudong International Airport 10,317. In the same period last year, the two airports had 9,513 and 13,701 scheduled flights respectively.

A number of domestic flights restarted in mid-May, especially by those carriers based in Shanghai. Juneyao Airlines, for instance, has already resumed flights to Changsha, Nanning, Sanya, Qingdao, Zhengzhou and other cities. But the number of passenger flights was down 63.9 percent on May 30 from the same period last year, according to Flight Master.

There will, though, be another fuel charge increase, the fourth in four months, for domestic flights. Several airlines have said they will charge an extra CNY80 (USD12) per person for distances less than 800 kilometers and CNY140 (USD21) per person for distances more than 800 kilometers. The fees are now seven times what they were at the beginning of the year and have reached an all-time high for short-haul routes.

Carriers have little choice as aviation fuel prices are the highest they have been in a decade, rising to CNY8,441 (USD1,267) per ton in June from CNY4,700 per ton at the beginning of the year.
Shanghai announced a gradual reopening from Monday of businesses, although it remains unclear when the millions of people still locked down in China's economic capital will finally be allowed out of their homes.

Confronted with its worst COVID-19 outbreak since the beginning of the pandemic, China -- the last major economy still closed off to the world -- put the city of 25 million under heavy restrictions in early April.

The rigid strategy to root out cases at all costs has wreaked havoc on supply chains, crushed small businesses and imperiled the country's economic goals.

For many Shanghai residents, some of whom were already confined to their homes even before April, the frustrations have included problems with food supplies, access to non-COVID medical care and spartan quarantine centers, and many are venting their anger online.

Shanghai Vice Mayor Chen Tong on Sunday announced a reopening of businesses "in stages" from May 16.Chen, however, did not specify if he was referring to a gradual resumption of activity in the city or if it was conditional on certain health criteria.

Under China's zero-COVID strategy, any lifting of restrictions is generally conditional on seeing no new positive cases for three days, outside of quarantine centers.Infections appear to be on the decline, with 1,369 new cases reported on Sunday in Shanghai, way down from more than 25,000 at the end of April.

In some areas of the city, however, restrictions have been tightened in recent days.Some 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) north, residents of Beijing fear they could face a similar lockdown after more than a thousand cases were recorded in the capital since the end of April.

Beijing has repeatedly tested its residents and locked down buildings with positive cases and closed metro stations and non-essential businesses in certain neighborhoods.In an attempt to curb the outbreak, Fangshan district in the southwest of Beijing, which has 1.3 million residents, suspended taxi services from Saturday.

Apart from a few neighborhoods which are under restrictions, the majority of Beijing's 22 million inhabitants can still leave their homes.But many public places are closed and residents are forced to work from home, especially in the populous Chaoyang district, where many multinationals are based.