After six years of talks, China has agreed to open a new corridor through its tightly restricted air space that could save airlines a total of $30 million in annual fuel costs and trim an average of half an hour off flight times between China and Europe, according to the International Air Transport Association, the main trade group for the world's airlines.

The savings is important but not huge, given the blow that high fuel prices have dealt airlines. Still, creation of the new route is the first of several steps the IATA wants Chinese authorities to make to unclog the country's sparse network of air corridors and prevent lengthening delays in flights to and from China's biggest cities.

The need to ease restrictions on China's air space has gained urgency, the IATA says, because of the profusion of foreign airlines flying to the country and the torrid growth of China's own carriers.

More Chinese are flying than ever before, as restrictions on travel are loosened and the nation's middle class expands. To meet China's booming demand for air travel, the government's current five-year economic plan calls for Chinese airlines to acquire around 650 new jetliners by the end of 2010, a 75% expansion in the size of their combined fleets. An anticipated deluge of visitors to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing would add to the pressure on China's already congested air routes.

Initially, 110 flights a week could benefit from the new route, which will shave half an hour from a trip that normally lasts 12 to 13 hours, the IATA said. Carriers likely to benefit include Air France-KLM, British Airways, Cathay Pacific Airways, Lufthansa, FedEx and United Parcel Service. The IATA said the accord would slice a collective $30 million off the annual fuel bill of the airlines that it affects.

Although Chinese aviation authorities generally support the liberalization the IATA has been seeking, China's armed forces, which have ultimate control of the country's air space, have been more reluctant. They perceive foreign airlines as a possible threat to national security and prohibit them from flying over military bases and other sensitive installations.

Only 30% of China's air space is open to civil aviation, making it one of the world's most restricted countries. Airlines flying over Chinese territory must follow rigid and often meandering routes replete with doglegs and 90-degree turns, each of which means that flights take longer and burn more fuel than if they followed a straighter line.

The Chinese "are kind of in a league of their own" in terms of air-space restrictions, said David Behrens, the IATA's director of safety, operations and infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region. For example, in Australia and many other countries, jetliners can divert from their planned flight paths to detour around a thunderstorm. Chinese air-traffic controllers are much less flexible, and a severe storm can temporarily halt flights along a route over China, Mr. Behrens said in an interview.

Although military control of air space isn't unusual elsewhere, armed forces in most other countries have cooperated more readily with the IATA to improve access to air space, Mr. Behrens said. India, Pakistan and Iran took just two years to approve new air routes, while in China, a wait lasting four to six years "is not uncommon," he said.

Still, Mr. Behrens welcomed approval of the new route across western China as a sign of a new, more accommodating approach.

"That's the good news. I think that China as a whole is realizing that things are changing rapidly and that's going to require changes in air space," said Mr. Behrens, who helped lead the IATA's negotiations with the Chinese. "We are having more dialogue with the military than we have had in the past."

An official at China's Air Traffic Management Bureau declined to comment on the agreement or prospects for expanded access in the future.

The new route, which opens officially Thursday, will create a shortcut for airlines flying between Europe and the Chinese cities of Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong, and between Europe and Manila. Airlines traveling from southern China and Manila to Europe typically fly north across China and then take a sharp, 70-degree turn to the Northwest before exiting Chinese air space. The new route, referred to as IATA-1, is a corridor measuring 955 nautical miles (with an optional spur of 224 nautical miles) that will partly flatten out this sharp angle.

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