Why Flights Through China Take Such Weird Routes

Video written by Ben Doyle

[zhuofanzhang]

Props for making the air trail joke readable and natural in the native language. Few people who wrote easter eggs in Chinese managed to do that.

[baksatibi]

Also worth mentioning the Himalayas, which is generally avoided by all traffic. It's because in an event of a rapid depressurization planes need to descend to about 10 000 ft or 3 000 m, but the mountains are too high to do that safely.

[shanghaidiscovery]

When flying domestic in China, you get delayed by the fact air traffic control is indeed controlled by the military but also the fact that they there is a hierarchy to which flights go first: international first, then flights to Beijing, then flights to other larger cities, then the rest... And then it depends on the airline. Some airlines like Spring airlines which is super budget seems to be making money by selling some of its takeoff slots to other more premium airlines. Airlines least likely to be delayed are Hainan and Juneyao. Also never take last flight of the day if you can avoid it

[benhaller]

Lived in Shanghai for several years. Taking the high speed train was sometimes shorter than the flight, even though the plane should be more than twice as fast. The train stations are much more centrally located, have less security theatre/wait times, and are not often delayed. Flights on the other hand, almost never took off on time. 30 min delay was a good delay. I'd sometimes sit on the plane for 2hrs before it would take off, then it would be another 2hrs+ to get to Beijing. Definitely made flying way worse than it had to be.

[YukiThor]

laughed so hard at the airplane doing a chinese phrase

the phrase actually means
"this joke is funny"

[Vexxed]

Convoluted air space in China makes high speed train lines more popular.

[bxlinev]

I’m a pilot working in China, in fact some of those military airspace are sometimes open to civilian aircrafts, if there’s no military activity in side that airspace, or sometimes even there is on going military activity, it’s still negotiable, the civil aviation ATC will negotiate with military controllers. Sometimes they approve sometimes they don’t. The biggest inconvenience for me is the open time of those airspace is not transparent, the ATC or some departments of the operators may sometimes know the plan of their military activity, but we as pilots most of the time aren’t able to get those information, thus adjust our expectations or even flight plans. I’ve been flying in France for 1-2 years and they have a lot of restricted airspace too, some of those are military airspace, but their pilots are able to know the exact time of opening or closure of those airspace through the NOTAMs, which we don’t have here in China. I kind of get it that is to protect their military secrets, but for me this is really causing inconvenience & threats, sometimes even danger, to civil aviation here.

[ThaBeatConductor]

3:34 "Mouse themed swamp"
Glad someone recognizes Florida for what it is.

[Thebreakdownshow]

Now it all adds up I never understood why china is so keen on making all the fast-moving trains and how they are so profitable compared to cross-country flights.

[taukid]

I actually loved the ad at the end. I've long suspected this channel was just a bet to see how much stock footage you could use but I was a bit off. Real power move by the sponsor though, lol.

[kevinzhan]

You’ll certainly hear the announcement “the flight xxx is cancelled/delayed due to air traffic control” at all airports, that’s really common and happens all the time at all airports I’ve been to in China

[Natasha-tuqs]

I lived in Shanghai for a couple of years and can vouch for the terrible air passenger experience. A relative came out to visit me once and their flight was delayed by over 8 hours! Got diverted to Xiamen. Zero communication from the ground team.

[MatuteG]

The flight restriction over Disney ends at 3000 feet. It’s actually easy to fly over and see the fireworks

[WilburLin]

I'm convinced that this was originally a serious Wendover project but then they realized they can have more fun by doing it on the HAI channel...

[KristinAlder]

I went to China in 2012 and in 2017. Both times there were minor and major delays waiting for planes. The shortest delay was 1 hour. The longest delay was 4 hours. The 4 hour one was such a pain because they kept saying they had to move which gate it was going to be at, but wouldn't say which one.

[MrOutofcontrolvideos]

Fun fact: Until recently this meant the civil flight training was completely impossible, meaning that almost every commercial pilot in China is trained in either Australia, Europe or America. Including about 100 by me (all working for Sichuan or Eastern). Covid has, atleast for now put a stop to that.

[egpx]

ITSUX is my favourite five letter designated waypoint. It’s somewhere over the North Sea on the boundary of Scottish and Danish airspace.

[JasmineJu]

I traveled to China in 2019 and it's certainly gotten better. Many disused military airports have been converted to civilian airports which has made connections to smaller cities a lot more easier.

[MyCarllee]

Chinese here. The reason why our airway system is like this is because our government is really sensitive about geographical information, and dont want foreign entities to get a hold of China's landscape layout. The map you see on Google Maps is actually provided by government backed companies. Those coordinates are skewed several hundered meters. You can still use gps navigation in China l, because there're servers that run secret algoritms to convert real world coordinates to skewed coordinates. Only government has the accurate geographic data.

There's a bit of history involved in why our government goes about such length to protect geo data. Years before WWII, Japan's government began mapping China's vast landscape in preparation for war to occupy China. Some say that began 50 years before WWII when Japan finally eexecuted their plan. Nowadays, protecting geo data is mainly to protect us from precision air strikes.

[cbohn]

The weirdest route I ever saw in China doing this was KLM Flight 807 from Amsterdam to Taipei Taoyuan, it enters China, fly all the way south to Hong Kong, then makes an almost complete u-turn to the north-east direction to Taipei, this was pre-covid era before KLM shuffled their Asia flights.

Also, note-worthy, if you fly from the Philippines to some parts of China, like Beijing and Shanghai, you always fly avoiding Taiwanese airspace.