During 4 months from January to April in 2009, total number of passengers on the General Administration of Civil Aviation of China (CAAC) flight, under the impact of the international financial crisis, reached 7.1372 million, still with a double-digit growth over the same periods last year.

Turnover volume of passenger transportation through CAAC rose to 12.69 billion ton-km, volume of freight and mail transportation to 12.15 billion tons. Domestic transportation was less influnced by the financial crisis but international passengers and freight transportation more, the latter bottoming out in February. Currently, it showed the sign of recovery but that of slow one, with much difficulty in full restoration in a short term. Seat kilometer utilization in CAAC has held 76%, up 4% year-on-year.

Last year in China, there were 192.5 million passengers travelling on flight.

Global civil aviation is confronted with the biggest challenges arising from uncertainty of financial crisis and global economy development, violent fluctuation of oil price, and other environmental factors like the increasing pressure of environmental protection and security. In order to ensure the sustainable development of civil aviation, we must strengthen exchange and cooperation and aim at the long-term development. On the one hand, we must establish the public aviation transportation system so as to speed up the development of branch line aviation, and on the other establish and improve national security program and security administration system so as to strengthen the development of general aviation.

Worldwide economic degradation shrank the need for air transportation. Global civil aviation has thus sunk into the biggest developmental crisis since the Word War Two.

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