United Airlines wants to resume four passenger routes to China next month while Delta Air Lines wants to resume two. But a temporary Chinese policy allows only one route.
The U. S. government is threatening action against Chinese airlines, bullying Beijing to lift coronavirus restrictions on passenger flights.
United Airlines wants to resume four routes to China next month while Delta Air Lines wants to resume two. But a temporary Chinese policy allows an airline only one route.
“China has, over the objections of the U. S. government, impaired the operating rights of U. S. carriers,” Department of Transportation Assistant Secretary Joel Szabat wrote to Chinese airlines in a public letter.
Szabat ordered seven Chinese airlines to submit their U. S. flight schedules by May 27. It is a banal procedure of publicly available information – take off time, aircraft type, codeshare – but Szabat said the U. S. would assess if those Chinese flights “may be contrary to applicable law or adversely affect the public interest.”
This dispute dates to March when China restricted airlines to having one passenger flight into the country, a limitation that gave China time to develop health protocols for screening international flights.
The policy was universal; Chinese airlines were also capped at one weekly passenger flight.
China’s local coronavirus infections were rapidly decreasing but imported cases were growing. Chinese airlines and airports implemented biosecurity policies faster and more extensively than U. S. peers, even though all three major U.
