Why do the FM aircraft have the SkyTeam logo on them if they are not a SkyTeam airline?
It appears that,
at the time MU joined, FM was also intended/supposed to join. And perhaps maybe it did, at least for the first few years.
However, it seems that MU still operates FM as a "separate" entity. As you can clearly see from the
Skyteam website Shanghai Airlines is *not* a member, and I can find no mention of it anywhere on their website (where, in the past, Shanghai Airlines was specifically mentioned on the China Eastern page on the Skyteam website). It's certainly not mentioned anywhere on the
China Eastern page of the Skyteam website at present. And while you may find some references online to it being a "Skyteam affiliate", I am not sure what that means, because no such concept is mentioned on the Skyteam website. And, while many of the Skyteam members have subsidiary and affiliate airlines which operate flights on their behalf and which are not themselves Skyteam members - such as, for instance, Air France HOP and KLM Cityhopper - these flights are always sold as AF/KL flights and do not have the same separate existence quite to the same extent that FM apparently still does. As to why FM is apparently allowed to display the Skyteam logo - that I cannot address. Perhaps there are still some old airframes that were painted back in 2011/2012 when this was the plan, and were never adapted to correct the "mistake"....just like old press releases are rarely edited after the fact to account for changed plans.
And the KLM link I put in post #4 presumbly only refers to people with FM's program earning when flying with SkyTeam airlines rather than the other way around.
Again, just because something was planned in 2011/12 doesn't necessarily mean it ever actually happened. Or maybe China Eastern decided that they didn't want to pay two membership fees, and sometime thereafter stopped paying for FM to be a member.
I really don't know.
But all that matters is: FM is not a current member of Skyteam, and you will NOT earn FB miles or XP on flights operated by FM.
see also:
Lounge access (and SkyPriority) on Shanghai Airlines (FM)?
Ignore the reports from the several Delta flyers in that thread; the
Delta Skymiles airline partners page for China Eastern clarifies that you will earn on FM operated flights in a way that simply is not possible in Flying Blue; so there was never any doubt that Delta flyers would earn, and this should not give you any false hope that Flying Blue will similarly let you earn, because it won't.