Air Changan: What to Know About One of China's Lesser-Known Regional Airlines

History and positioning

Air Changan's story is almost a case study in how tangled the ownership arrangements of Chinese regional airlines can be: born as Chang'an Airlines in 1993, folded into the HNA merger that gave rise to Grand China Air in 2007, and then flying again with its own operating certificate in 2016 under its current name. The restructuring of the HNA group in the following years also involved this airline, without however interrupting its activity on Shaanxi's domestic routes.

The fleet

The fleet consists of a small number of Boeing 737-800s, sized for a purely domestic short- and medium-haul network, far in scale from China's major airlines.

Routes and network

From Xi'an, Air Changan connects about twenty domestic destinations on a network of roughly two dozen routes, touching cities such as Changchun, Changsha, Dalian, Guilin, Haikou, Shenyang, Xining and Yinchuan: more a regional connector than a structured national network.

Air Changan makes sense if you need to connect Xi'an with a second-tier Chinese city poorly served by the major airlines, not if you are looking for an international network: the routes are exclusively domestic. It must be said clearly that independent reviews of this airline in Italian or English are practically nonexistent, a limit to keep in mind before making predictions about the onboard service. The practical tip is to book through the main Chinese online agencies (or an agency that works through them), because the airline's direct booking channels are in Mandarin.