conde

It isn't right that the Chinese government give CX such a hard time. Only we the Flyertalk flyers should be able to give CX a hard time.

If the Chinese government suggested to improve current catering services on flights from Hong Kong, and ban related services or supplies coming from the mainland (for health and safety reasons, and to prevent in-flight riots), that would be better.

On a more serious note, hopefully CX can navigate past this adversity and be successful. I support the airline and the CX staff on that front.

CX HK

2 things from my point of view:

1. China continually proves to the world they (often) have the temperament of an immature child; constantly out for revenge, seeking to "one-up" someone, name calling, bullying. If you didn't know what the protests were about, now you know. Disgraceful.
   
2. CX / Swire will likely bow to pressure somewhat because Swire Properties already bowed to pressure, and had to "co-sign" some condemnation of the protests after China openly criticized HK's real estate companies for not being vocal enough in their opposition to the protests. But I'm hoping CX takes this opportunity to tell the world it won't put up with this bullying.

azepine00

and yet it will not stop aa ua dl etc from happily taking business from from cx - i highly doubt they will suspend flights in solidarity..

it is a very very unfortunate escalation...

GrayAnderson

It's a godsdamned shame that the rest of OW wouldn't cut Mainland China off in response. On the "bright" side there are no OW airlines based in Red China (CX, in Hong Kong, is the closest), though I'd love to have seen one of China's "big three" lose its codeshare partners overnight (and I do mean overnight).

Practically speaking, the "best" answer for CX would be to bifurcate their duty rosters. Flights heading to Japan and the West Coast of the US won't be severely affected by the routing rules, for example.

In an ideal world, the US would issue CX a waiver and allow them to run a limited number of East Coast-West Coast-Hong Kong (or East Coast-Hawaii-Hong Kong) flights with cabotage permitted, perhaps under the nominal aegis of American. If they were willing to tweak pricing, they could make up for a lot of lost long-haul revenue with their hard product, and doing so might give American a little bit of room to shuffle some planes around. That would fix the problem for North America. For the rest of the world, I'm thinking that they could probably stage a pretty good raid into Europe-India (particularly after the collapse of Jet Airways) if they were willing to channel a bunch of flights through one or two airports there and India were willing to "play ball". The other thing I would wish for (but we won't see) would be them teaming up with SQ in some way since they both have amazing products. I realize there are practical reasons for this, sadly.

peasant

Davvidd

You know that the Hong Kong CAD is subservient to the CAAC in all aspects. They will not go against the CAAC. CX is fried unless they sort out this mess.

aceofangel

pbd456

there was a video about KA crew bullying an old man to get off metro due to political difference.

can they bully people off the plane due to political difference?

Unionruler

AA/UA should give their crew one more rest day in Hong Kong on the condition that they either attend a peaceful protest, or stage their own "fair treatment of airline crew" sit-in.

I must say that this also looks uncharacteristic for China. China loves policy uniformity...how can one apply a regulation to a single airline and not others.

newflyer530

TBH i don't get the rhetoric of dragging any US airline into the game, enlighten me? Isn't it a little illusional? Why would AA/UA even care? They probably secretly can't wait for CX to go down so they could get more business out of HKG and the greater Asian market...

m.y

In a fantasy world perhaps, why would U.S (especially airline unions) and India want to be sacrifice their own national airlines just to help CX? Even if CX were allowed to operate those flights, the cost would be much more expensive due to not having crew bases abroad meaning each round trip would be 7 day trips for the crew with a day paid rest after 3 out of 4 legs.

Unionruler

Not sure what business out of Hong Kong you're talking about...Western governments already communicated to Beijing that if Hong Kong's sovereignty cannot be guaranteed, then preferential economic treatment will be rescinded accordingly. Also, Hong Kong is a mere 3% of China's GDP. US airlines had better be making money out of China as opposed to Hong Kong, with or without the protests.

Hong Kong as a O&D point without CX/KA connections really isn't much to cling on to, especially since the financial flows will only keep weakening if Beijing doesn't change its stance one way or the other (either relent or be extremely strong handed), so might as well use it for diplomacy.

newflyer530

Which is exactly why the likes of AA/UA do not have much interests in participating in the mess, as you suggested in your previous post...

sxc

Unionruler

So you are okay with precedent being set that an aviation regulator can subject a single airline to personnel screening regulations of a political nature overnight