Airport rapped over teen stowaway
Print Edition
PUDONG International Airport has been banned from applying for new, extra or charter flights following an incident in which a Chinese teenager stowed away on a flight to Dubai.
The Civil Aviation Administration of China is carrying out a safety evaluation at the airport and flight applications will be halted until that is completed, the regulator said on its website.
It said it had also imposed an “administrative penalty” on Shanghai Airport Authority, which operates the city’s two airports.
At a meeting on Wednesday, after airport authority officials had been summoned to give a report on the incident, CAAC Deputy Director Li Jian said: “The incident is quite serious and has caused abominable influence.”
It reflected serious safety risks at the Pudong airport, he said.
“The airport authority must enhance safety management, especially for restricted areas at the airport,” Li said, according to the website.
The 16-year-old stowaway, surnamed Xu, from southwest China’s Sichuan Province, sneaked into the cargo hold of Emirates flight EK303 on May 26, hoping to make a fortune by begging in Dubai.
But when the flight landed over nine hours later, Xu was arrested by airport police. He was repatriated to China since he was a minor.
An investigation by the regulator’s east China branch found that Xu had taken Metro Line 2 to the airport, waited until it got dark and climbed a tree that enabled him to scale the 10-meter fence.
He hid until he saw there was no one guarding the cargo door of the Emirates plane and climbed in.
Xu is said to have told his lawyer he wasn’t concerned about his safety and though he felt extremely cold after the plane took off, he wrapped himself up in some material he found and fell asleep until the plane landed in Dubai.
“It is lucky the teenager was not a terrorist,” Huang Quan, a legal professor with the Civil Aviation University of China, told China Central Television. “The fence, security guards and surveillance cameras, which are the three major security measures at the airport, all became invalid in the incident.”
He told CCTV the airport authority was mainly responsible because it failed to carry out security measures effectively. However, the regulator had also failed to properly supervise the airport authority, he added.
The airport authority declined to comment on the regulator’s announcement yesterday, except saying that it had upgraded security levels at Pudong after an incident last Sunday when a man set off an explosive device in the departure hall.
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