A senior civil aviation official told an industry forum in Beijing yesterday that operational safety in China's airports needs to be improved to keep pace with the rapid expansion of air travel, and that four fifths of them fail basic safety standards.

"I'm not confident in the safety situation of the nation's airports, especially considering China's booming civil aviation industry," said Qin Zhanggao, vice-director of the General Administration of Civil Aviation of China (CAAC)'s Department of Airports.

According to Qin, last year a total of 64 safety incidents took place in or near airports across the nation, 70 to 80 percent of the country's air accidents.

This included 10 runway intrusions, 5 power supply and flight area accidents and 25 cases of aircraft being struck by birds or other flying objects.

He made the remarks while addressing the ACI-Pacific Best Practice Seminar & CEO Forum, jointly organized by Airports Councils International (ACI) Pacific and the Capital Airport Holding Company.

The CAAC said that by the end of last year there were 137 airports on the mainland. They handled around 242 million passengers and 4.5 million tons of cargo and post last year, an increase of 38.8 and 22.3 percent respectively on 2003.

"Over 80 percent of airports in the country fail to meet standards for installing safety facilities such as firefighting and emergency rescue equipment," Qin said.

In addition, safety problems were also found in airport power supplies, runways, taxiway surfacing, airport fencing, and in the prevention of bird strikes.

"Accident prevention in airports has become a key element of strengthening the civil aviation transport businesses," Qin said.

Internationally, airports try to avoid airport-related accidents by adopting a safety management system.

It is not adequate to rely purely on the investigation of accidents and resulting recommendations, said Edmund Wong, senior operations officer of Hong Kong's Civil Aviation Department. "The aim should be to identify and rectify failures in the system prior to problems developing."

Qin's administration is working on this kind of preventative mechanism while drafting some rules and regulations on airport safety management.

"The CAAC is working to improve training requirements for air-side security personnel at airports and also establishing rules on the development of emergency rescue plans," Qin said.

It is estimated there will be almost 200 civilian airports in the country by 2010. For the next 16 years, 400,000 square meters of passenger terminal and 150,000 square meters of cargo transportation station will be built each year, according to the CAAC.

(China Daily April 20, 2005)