Blue skies ahead
Updated: 2008-06-13 18:16
Getting Started
British Airways' predecessor, Imperial Airways, first flew to Hong Kong in 1936 and British Airways first flew to Beijing in 1980, though the flights had to stop in Bahrain and Hong Kong along the way.
Besides passengers, British Airways' inaugural flight from London to Beijing also carried medical data of a 7-year-old female panda in the London Zoo. The documents were for Jingjing, which nearly died from a rare disease but later recovered. Jingjing and Jiajia, a male panda, were a present from the Chinese government to Britain in 1974. The medical data were sent to Chinese animal experts at the Beijing Zoo.
Nonstop once-weekly London-Beijing services commenced in 1993.
But British Airways didn't grow in China as fast as it originally planned and it didn't begin flying nonstop to Shanghai, the country's economic center, until 2005.
The previous aviation agreement between the Chinese and UK governments only allowed British carriers to operate 10 weekly flights from the UK to China. British Airways was awarded six weekly flights to Beijing and the remaining four to Shanghai went to Virgin Atlantic.
In 2004, the two governments reached a memorandum of understanding , which significantly increased the number of flights between the two countries. They increased from 10 in 2004 to 31 in 2006. British carriers were also allowed to fly to six other Chinese cities.
British Airways now flies daily to Beijing, three times daily to Hong Kong and five times a week to Shanghai. It has the largest capacity on the Sino-British route compared to Virgin Atlantic, Air China and China Eastern Airlines.
The airline earlier this year increased its capacity to China by 50 percent by changing from Boeing 777s, serving Beijing, to Boeing 747s. It also plans to fly daily to Shanghai in the "very near future", says Thorley.
The company witnessed double-digit growth during the past two years and Thorley expects to see that growth rate to continue through 2010.
Thorley's confidence comes from China's booming commercial air traffic market. The average annual growth rate of air travelers in China has been more than 15 percent over the last several years and high growth rates are expected to continue until 2020.
About 100,000 Chinese people traveled to the UK in 2004, according to British Airways. That figure is expected to double to 200,000 in 2010, Thorley says.
Business exchanges between China and the UK have been growing steadily.
The UK is China's third largest trading partner in the European Union. Bilateral trade between the two countries exceeded $37 billion in 2007, surging 29 percent year-on-year. The Chinese Ministry of Commerce said bilateral trade would exceed $60 billion by 2010.
The UK is China's largest source of foreign investment in the European Union. The number of UK-invested projects in China reached 5,834 by the end of 2007, representing total investment volume of $28.58 billion.
|
||
|
||
|
|
|
|