page_title: Civil aviation in China
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Civil aviation in China / History
caption_attribution_description: 中文（繁體）‎: 1923年7月，楊仙逸製成中國自行設計生產的以「樂士文」（Rosamonde，宋慶齡的英文名）命名的第一架軍用飛機，正式試航及命名典禮在大沙頭機場舉行。圖為孫中山和宋慶齡。
context_page_description: As of December 2017, there are 229 commercial airports in China.
  Around 500 airports of all types and sizes were in operation in 2007, about 400 of which had paved runways and about 100 of which had runways of 3,047 m or shorter. There also were 35 heliports in 2007, an increasingly used type of facility. With the additional airports came a proliferation of airlines.
  China has the fastest growing passenger air market of any country in the world and between 2009 and 2014 the number of passengers increased over 47% from 266,293,020 to 390,878,784. In 2014 China was second only to the United States in total numbers of passengers carried.
context_section_description: The Nanyuan Airport first broke ground in Beijing near the end of the Qing Dynasty, and Chinese aviation pioneers Qin Guoyong and Li Ruyan, the chief of the flight school established there in 1913 under then-president Yuan Shikai, had established the first airline service with a route between Beijing and Baoding in 1914. The Beijing Nanyuan Airport ceased civil aviation operations in 2019, after 109 years of service.
  In 1939 at Tsing Hua University a cadre of students constructed a wind tunnel with the help of Frank Wattendorf, a graduate of Harvard, MIT and Caltech. It was assigned to Tsing Hua Aeronautical Research Institute under the direction of Y. H. Ku.
  Before the Chinese Civil War, there were Republic of China joint ventures with Pan American World Airways and Lufthansa. In 1946 Civil Air Transport (Air America) was founded by General Claire L. Chennault and Whiting Willauer for the relief of RoC. As a result of the Chinese Civil War, the Communist Party of China took control of mainland China, and only Civil Air Transport moved along with the Kuomintang (KMT)-controlled RoC government to Taiwan.
  In 1949 the new government established the aviation authority and operator General Administration of Civil Aviation of China.
  In 1987, China's government separated the airline operations of General Administration of Civil Aviation of China into a number of state-owned enterprises. The regulatory role was retained by the General Administration of Civil Aviation of China which is now known as Civil Aviation Administration of China.
  In 2004, the turnover of airfreight reached 7.18 billion ton-km, the passenger turnover was 178.2 billion person-km, and the volume of freight traffic 2.767 million tons. China had a total of 1,279 civil flight routes, 1,035 of them domestic routes reaching all large and medium-sized cities, and 244 of them international, connecting China with more than 70 cities overseas.
  China's passenger airline industry is dominated by the three state-owned airlines; Air China, China Southern Airlines and China Eastern Airlines. There are limited competition from private operators in the commercial passenger market such as Spring Airlines but the state owned operators have the political and financial wherewithal from the central government to lead the market.
caption: The Rosamonde biplane, the first indigenously designed and flown aircraft in China
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