China Eastern/Hainan in talks with oneWorld
 

According to sources from China which first reported Air China and Shanghai Airlines' entry to Star alliance, is now reporting Hainan Airlines and China Eastern Airlines are both in talks with oneWorld for membership.　

China Eastern recently speed up its talks with oneWorld after China Southern signed MoU to join Skyteam while Shanghai Airlines joins Star, and followed by Air China's decision to Star. It is feeling the heat right now as Shanghai Airlines is joining Star in 2007. "If China Eastern didn't act right away, its market advantage will soon to fade". China Eastern is close to a tie-up agreement covering FFP and Codeshare deal with Cathay Pacific at the meantime.

Meanwhile, Hainan Airlines' marketing personnel told the reporter it has been in touched with oneWorld for a while, but nothing has been reached. Hainan's relationship with oneWorld is due to AMR Corp, parent of American Airlines, holds share in the 4th largest chinese carrier (???), as well as close cooperation with future oneWorld member MALEV.

If It does happen I think it would be a good thing OW need to keep growing to keep up with *A. I hope the talk about Ethiopian joining is true as well.

so at the end of the day all 5 biggest carriers in China will be part of an alliance :)
Can't wait any longer for EQMs!

Then there's talk of CX buying up KA and their entry into Oneworld too!

I hope its not China Eastern, they are the dodgiest airline going round, CZ is much better unfortunately its gone to Skyteam, but China Eastern is a terrible airline.

Is Dragon Air in an alliance? They have a good model fleet with loads of Western Pilots. They would be good.

I agree, do a Google search on China Eastern and see if you can find anything that isn't severely negative about the airline.

I'm not entirely comfortable with the premise behind this statement. Do you prefer not to fly on, say, SQ or MH or TG on the grounds that most of their pilots are not "Western"?

as bad as mu is, hu is considerably worse imo.

Although as a LCC CR Airways (now part of Hainan) is really not bad, except for their propensity to mess around with their schedules at very short notice and do everything under charter rules so you have no comeback when things go wrong...

Personally I prefer to fly carriers who have Western trained pilots, CX/SQ.

No not at all I have flown MH several times and have been more than happy with their service and I know SQ is as good as any. But I have been told of several "tense" moments on different Chinese based carriers and I am lead to believe "Western" training is more involved than SOME eastern training. I was also just making an observation that KA has several Australian pilots.

SQ/CX flight training is in Australia if I'm not mistaken, South Australia for CX and Queensland and Western Australia for SQ.

I think alot of the problems come down to communication in the cockpit, there is a tendency to follow hierachy in Asia than European cultures, hence the co-pilot may not say anything to correct an error, there is also a tendancy to deviate from SOP's more in Asia.

Either way there aint no way your getting me onto a China Airlines flight :D
http://www.airsafe.com/events/regions/asia.htm

MU are no more dodgy than any other Chinese airline. I've flown them domestically and they are fine. Other than lots of Chinese faces around no different than an intra-Europe carrier. And they do better meals than CZ who on a 2 hours flight offered be a packet of biscuits labelled as nothing other than 'Aviation Food'.

On the safety score it's probably fair to guess that Chinese carriers aren't as safe as QF, UA, BA, etc. That said it's all relative. Given the way most Chinese drive you're far more likely to get killed on the way to/from the airport.

As to why Chinese carriers aren't as safe I'd guess much of it comes down to the 'boss is always right' issue. And the airlines can preach CRM as much as they like, but getting Chinese people, in China, to go totally against Chinese culture is a near impossible thing to do.

While "dodgy" isn't a word I'd use to describe MU, they are still second worst in my book. I have no complaints about their service in the air, but their ground ops suck. In particular, they run an ambitious schedule between PEK and SHA (basically hourly), but on MANY occasions, I've arrived at the airport to find my 5p flight merged with the 6p flight. The other carriers do this too, of course, but when flying MU, I've found that info regarding such matters never reaches the check-in counter. So, I've learned to avoid holding MU tickets when time is of the essence. Even an HU ticket is better because when they cancel flights, they tend to be upfront about it.

I actually prefer HU to MU (albeit in my limited experience with them over the past few weeks). Either way, even if they do have bad service it will be nice to have such great connections within China.

If oneworld decides to let MU into oneworld, it'll take them three years just to get up to standards. It has to be one of the worst airlines I've ever taken. As one of the previous responders said, the inflight service was fair, but ground service was atrotious!!!!

If you are transitting thought PVG, fugagetabouit!!!!!!!! Last year, I took a flight from HKG to LAX, via PVG. I thought I only need to go through security. WRONG!!!! Had to queue through customs and fill out those 2 or 3 forms,(luckily I had a multiple entry visa), go downstairs to the baggage claim area to get boarding passes issued for PVG-LAX, go back upstairs to go through customs again (and fill out more forms), and get screened. Luckily, I had three hours for transit. I was left with only an hour to spare.

I know that OW is trying to recruit more carriers. That's great, but lets not go for quantity like *alliance. I rather have a small group of high quality airlines; CX, BA, QF, and LA. Soon, we can add JL to that list.

^
Good call, I actually like the way OW works, with most of the members being larger airlines, *A seems to have tried to go the way of quantity. I am looking forward to the new OW airlines to come on board. I agree that OW does need a presence in China but really I think it reflects badly on the other airlines within the alliance when they take on C grade carriers for the sake of having a presence in China. Just out of curiosity is there anything preventing CX from operating flights within mainland China?

yes

why hu is worse than mu
 

-lots of single-class slave ships
-no indication of "getting it" (at least mu has spent some money on finding quality FAs
-fares suggest it is the carrier of the last resort for many
-bus gates in places that don't require bus gates (and almost always in bj)

one nice thing about hu is that when there isn't an airplane to take you to xxx, the airport people seem to know about it, in which case your y300 ticket turns into gold. however, one of my friends recently got a phone call informing him that his noon flight had been "pushed back" to 8p (i.e. rebooked on the 8p flight). he simply called ctrip, gave them hell, and got put on the 12:30 fm flight. most travel agencies are loath to do this.

I agree OW needs to grow but that should be done with top tier carriers where possible. Is this possible in China? What is the deal with Dragon Air? Is it an option?

aviation in china is developing in step with the economy; chinese airlines won't be crappy forever (changes to date have already been significant).

whether or not they can snag ka, they still need at least one domestic chinese airline in their ranks in order to remain competitive with *a and skyteam.

Chinese airlines still run like they are in a communist country. Wait.. China is a Communist country!

Air China is joining *A.

Completely in agreement. The domestic carriers are not up with the likes of SQ, BA, CX.... but they are improving rapidly. I would say that the most noticeable change of the carriers I fly has been on the domestic Chinese airlines, whereas the top airlines are probably taking a slight step backwards.

The other thing to consider is that the domestic Chinese airlines are often very cheap - Beijing Shanghai can be as cheap as 320 RMB at times (40 USD). At the price, its a little unfair to compare that flight with Singapore Kuala Lumpur on SQ.

It has been five years since this thread.
Unfortunately, China Eastern has joined Skyteam.
When will Hainan Airlines join Oneworld.
Hainan Airlines is getting better and rated 5 star skytrax now.

I seem to recall that Hainan owns (or is part owner) of Hong Kong Airlines and Hong Kong Express. Would CX object to their entry?

Yes. This is a sticking point (which is likely to be resolved).