According to the information of the Jiangsu Provincial Department of Transportation, air transport in Jiangsu Province will resume in a full and orderly manner in 2023.
A total of 462,000 transport takeoffs and landings were guaranteed by 9 airports in the province, a year-on-year increase of 79.1%, which was basically the same as in 2019;
The passenger throughput was 54.821 million, a year-on-year increase of 122.9%, recovering to 93.8% in 2019, and the passenger scale returned to "50 million passengers";
Among the 9 airports, the annual passenger throughput of 3 airports in Wuxi Shuofang, Nantong Xingdong and Yangzhou Taizhou has reached a record high, and the domestic passenger throughput of 2 airports in Changzhou Benniu and Xuzhou Guanyin has achieved new breakthroughs.
Let's talk about Jiangsu Civil Aviation.
Compared with its own economic size, Jiangsu's civil aviation performance does not match the position of its economy.
Actually, you said he was weak, but it seems to be okay. There are a lot of civil aviation transport airports in Jiangsu, and the development is not too bad.
Among the thirteen cities, except for Suzhou and Zhenjiang in southern Jiangsu and Suqian in northern Jiangsu, there are no airports for the time being, and other cities have their own transport airports (Yangzhou and Taizhou share one airport).
All of these nine airports have been opened to the outside world (the latest one was in 2017), all of which are Class I air ports, and the annual throughput of each airport has exceeded one million passengers, with a growth rate of more than 13% for five consecutive years before the epidemic.
But if you say it's strong, it seems like that's what it is. In 2019, before the epidemic, the province's annual passenger throughput was 58 million, ranking third in East China and sixth in the country, and the total number of passengers could not catch up with the 76 million passengers of Pudong Airport.
Nanjing Lukou Airport, as a big Taibao, can't even enter the top ten in the country, which does not include Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan.
Lukou Airport ranked 11th in the country in 2019, 12th in 2020, 15th in 2021, and 13th in 2022.
This achievement is really average, and it can even be said that there are some stretches.
Of course, compared with Suzhou, the strongest city in Jiangsu's economy, Nanjing is reasonable.
After all, Suzhou is still thinking about "Suzhou Meiyou Airport".
Nanjing Lukou Airport
Wuxi Shuofang Airport
Yangzhou Taizhou Airport
There are of course many reasons for this, personal opinion:
First, the market competition environment is fierce. The airports in the surrounding provinces (cities) of Jiangsu are fiercely competitive, especially the two airports in Shanghai, as hub airports, which have considerable advantages in terms of routes and the number of flights, and have a convenient comprehensive transportation system.
The surrounding areas such as Wuxi Shuofang Airport, Changzhou Benniu Airport, and Nantong Xingdong Airport are small in scale, which can only ensure the take-off and landing of small and medium-sized aircraft, and cannot be developed as trunk airports, which restricts airlines from investing more capacity. In addition, the high-tech export-oriented economy in southern Jiangsu is developed, and the international air cargo supply is abundant, due to the limited resources of international cargo flights at the above-mentioned airports, it mainly relies on the Shanghai international aviation hub for distribution. As a result, a large part of the passenger and cargo sources in these areas flow into Shanghai.
Second, the airport's own strength is not good. It was not until 2018 that Jiangsu established the Eastern Airport Group to coordinate the layout and linkage. In the past, they were all fighting separately, with little resource investment and insufficient competitiveness, and 4 of the 9 airports were used by military and civilian use, and the flight growth of flights was greatly limited by airspace conditions and flight training of other airspace users, and the proportion of airports to meet the local market demand was very low, and there were certain difficulties in sustainable and stable development.
Third, airlines are not paying enough attention. There is a mismatch between the scale of base airlines and provinces and cities, and Jiangsu has not had a large base airlines for a long time, and the chief company China Eastern Airlines Jiangsu is very cautious in putting capacity in the province. So much so that everyone joked that the new 777F of Postal Airlines in 2023 turned out to be the first heavy aircraft among the base airlines of Nanjing Airport.
Fourth, the air traffic control system has not paid enough attention. Needless to say, there is still a certain gap between the air traffic control department of small and medium-sized airports and the air traffic control system in providing control services. However, among the nine airports in Jiangsu Province, only Nanjing Lukou Airport is provided by the air traffic control system, compared with Shanghai, Zhejiang, Hangzhou, Ningbo, Wenzhou, Shandong, Qingdao, Jinan, Fujian, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Jiangsu also has a certain gap in this regard.
Objectively speaking, there are many difficulties.
But the future is still bright, and the data for 2023 shows that the performance of airports is still passable, and there is still potential to be tapped.
I wish the development of civil aviation in Jiangsu is getting better and better, and reaching the average level of free shipping area as soon as possible!