State carrier Air China said late on Saturday it will “adjust” its flights between China and the United States due to the coronavirus epidemic.
A statement on the airline’s Weibo microblog showed that flights between Beijing and Washington, and Shenzhen and Los Angeles had been canceled.
China’s civil aviation authority last week urged domestic carriers to continue flying international routes after more than 25,000 flights to and from or within China were axed because of plunging demand.
(Reporting by Winni Zhou and Dominique Patton; Editing by Richard Chang)
Currently, the two countries’ airline service is not on equal footing.
The U.S. and China had about 325 weekly flights before the pandemic, and “it was roughly split 50-50 between Chinese and American carriers,” said Kenneth Button, a professor of public policy at George Mason University and an expert on transportation policy.
American carriers suspended service in February as COVID-19 began to spread out of China and around the world. By March, Beijing said that only foreign carriers that were still serving the country during the week of March 12 could fly to China afterward. That policy effectively excluded U.S. airlines from resuming service to China.
The U.S. DOT said it is concerned by China’s reluctance to abide by a 1980 agreement on civil aviation operations between the two countries, which says China must allow one U.S. carrier one flight to China for every flight to the U.S. by a Chinese carrier.
“We are back to 1980,” Button said. “They started their airline negotiations as they set up similar sort of arrangements — limited number of routes with two airlines into each country.”