Recently, CAAC officially issued the Measures for the Monitoring and Management of International Air Traffic Rights (hereinafter referred to as the Measures), which specifies that the routes and flights management system will be used to monitor and assess the use of international air traffic rights by air transport enterprises, so as to establish an effective in-process monitoring and restraint mechanism to continuously improve the efficiency of the use of international air traffic right resources and regulate the order of the international air transport market. The Measures will be effective on July 1.

The Measures adopt differentiated monitoring of international air traffic rights. Specifically, for CAT-I routes and traffic rights that have been liberalized, the focus is to monitor the overall utilization rate and the changes of flight plans; and for the relatively small number of CAT-II routes and traffic rights, it is necessary to monitor whether each route has been opened on time and whether allocated traffic rights have been fully used. According to the Measures, when the monitoring results reach a certain score, access restrictions will be imposed on the airline involved which will be prohibited from applying for new international routes for a period ranging from 1 month to 1 year.