China’s flight cancellations not a single day this week

For the past two days, social media has been flooded with rumours that a military coup has taken place in China and that President Xi Jinping has been placed under house arrest. These rumours gained traction after a person shared a video on social media claiming that a large military column was heading towards Beijing. Another user claimed that all flights to and from Beijing were suspended without any reason. On September 21st, Jennifer Zeng posted some screenshots and claimed that over 60 per cent of flights were cancelled across China. There was no reason for any of the offered reasons. As of 22: 35 on September 21, 16,062 flights were planned for the day, and 9,583 flights were canceled, she wrote on Twitter.

India Today investigated the claims - that the flights were cancelled on September 21 - but it did not find any unnatural drop in the number of flights at any given time. The flight operations appeared normal over Beijing, where the bulk of the military actions were to take place. In the following days, flight activity was normal on, on September 22, 23, 34, and 25. There were not even the slightest outliers in the patterns.

The following snapshots have been categorized into different timeslots across the 22nd, 23rd, 24th and 25th of September. It shows that the air traffic for each timelot is very similar on all the observed days this week.

India Today's Saikiran Kannan also went through the database of Chinese flights that took off and landed, which tracks the number of actual flights on a daily basis. The flight numbers had seen a cyclical dip from 2019 to 2022, each time there had been a large cluster or spread of Covid. Some commentators on social media suggested that the cancellation of flights could not be attributed to military intervention.

The number of flights from January this year to September has decreased by 46.4 per cent compared to the last year, according to the civil aviation operation briefing of China.

The data for 2019 is in blue, 2021 data in grey and 2022 data in red.

Why flight cancellation claims don't make sense?

The investigation found that many looked at the flight tracking data in the wrong context and wrong times. China is not as symmetrical as India in terms of population ratio and demographics. China is densely populated on its eastern and southern sides and not so much on its central and western sides. Many of the images shared of its airspace were projected as though there were no flights over most of China. Many snapshots of the air space posted online were taken during the wee hours of the Chinese local time zone. At that time, there were limited takeoffs and landings. This is down to people from across the globe who have taken a snapshot of the airspace at different times and not necessarily looking at peak flight hours in China.

China is probably the only country in the world with the toughest Covid restrictions in place. The country still shuts its towns and cities when new clusters emerge. China still follows a zero-covid policy and foreigners are not wholly welcome in the country. There have been mass flight cancellations in the country due to various internal realignments and procedures.

There were reported flight cancellations due to Covid precautions in place, especially as China celebrated its national day on October 1st to mark the formation of the People's Republic of China. There are some movements of military vehicles moving towards Beijing for the parade, this could be a reason why some vehicles were moving towards Beijing.