Flying high

Xu Shouqin could dream of better roads, but for a long time, taking a flight was beyond even his wildest imagination.

The 79-year-old resident of Cangyuan county, Yunnan province, took his first flight in 2017 to Beijing and Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province.

"It's like a dream to have an airport in my hometown," he said, adding that the primary means of transportation for people was on foot.

Forty years ago, Cangyuan county had no paved roads, let alone an airport, so when the Cangyuan Washan Airport opened in December 2016, Xu and many of his friends and neighbors attended the opening ceremony.

"It takes 50 minutes from Cangyuan to Kunming. I would never have been able to imagine how quickly I could travel to the provincial capital, even in my dreams," he said.

When the PRC was founded in 1949, the country had 40 airports, which mostly handled small aircraft. By the end of last year, that number had soared to 241.

Among the new ones, Beijing Daxing International Airport, a landmark megastructure, has attracted worldwide attention, and pushed civil aviation development to a new level.

It opened in 2019, and serves as the main air hub for traffic transferred from the Beijing Capital International Airport, which was the second busiest airport in the world by passenger traffic for a number of years before the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to guidelines issued earlier this year, China aims to have 400 airports by 2035.

The sector's development not only shows in terms of infrastructure, but also in the growth of passenger numbers.

Since 2005, China has ranked as the second largest market after the United States in terms of the number of passenger trips, according to national industry regulator, the Civil Aviation Administration of China.

China has been steadily recovering from the pandemic, and is poised to become the world's largest air transport market around the mid-2020s, said Feng Zhenglin, the administration's head.

Since the start of the pandemic, the global civil aviation industry has seen a significant decline in passenger trips and quoting an estimate from the International Air Transport Association, Feng said that international travel probably won't recover to pre-pandemic levels until 2024.

In this respect, China is already doing better. By May 18, Beijing Daxing International Airport had handled 10 million passenger trips, reaching the mark more than four months earlier than last year.

"During this period, we will focus on the domestic market as a strategic pivot, increasing strength to prepare for global competition," he added.

China's civil aviation industry began in 1950 with 12 air routes connecting seven domestic cities and at the time, air travel was a luxury beyond the reach of most people.

By 1978, when reform and opening-up policy began, China had 150 domestic air routes reaching 79 cities, and 144 carriers and handling 2.31 million passenger trips.

By 2019, the country operated 4,568 domestic air routes reaching 234 cities and had an international network spanning 167 cities in 65 countries, with 953 international air routes.

That year, China handled 660 million passenger trips, proving that air travel was no longer a luxury, but a part of ordinary people's lives.

Looking ahead

For its next step, China aims to build an integrated transport network that provides more convenient and even higher-quality service by 2035, the date the country has set to realize its goal of socialist modernization.

According to high-profile guidelines released earlier this year, a comprehensive transportation network of about 700,000 km will have been created by then, one that is convenient, cost-effective, green, intelligent and safe.

This future transportation grid will give most residents access to a national highway within 15 minutes, a freeway within half an hour, and a railway within an hour.

A more convenient logistics network will also be built, which will permit parcels to be delivered nationally in a day, to neighboring countries in two days, and to reach major cities around the world in three days.

"The network will connect all county-level administrative regions, borders, major facilities and tourism spots and will be comprised of roads, railways, air routes and waterways," Transport Minister Li Xiaopeng said.