China Eastern Airlines today said it has suspended two senior officials after some pilots had been found intentionally disrupting flights last week in Yunnan Province.

Twenty-one flights returned to the departure point just after taking off in Yunnan on March 31 and April 1, postponing the travel plans of more than 1,000 passengers.

An initial investigation showed that some of the flights were disrupted by pilots rather than poor weather, the Shanghai-based carrier said in a statement today.

China Eastern said it had suspended some suspects and two senior officials at its Yunnan subsidiary and that they would remain under investigation.

Li Yangmin, vice general manager of China Eastern, will work as the acting general manager of the Yunnan subsidiary.

The carrier initially said the planes returned because of poor weather, which triggered public suspicion as other carriers operated normally on that day.

Media reports also suggested pilots carried out the moves in a protest over pay and working conditions.

China Eastern and the Civil Aviation Administration of China sent a work team to the province to investigate the case and said pilots involved in "flight returns" would be penalized if they were found to have intentionally disrupted flights.

Affected passengers will get relevant compensation after submitting boarding passes to the company, the carrier said.

Conflicts between pilots and state-owned airlines have intensified in recent years because of the short supply of pilots.

China has 12,000 civilian pilots, but official figures predict that the total number of flights will increase 80 percent by 2010 and 6,500 more pilots will be required.

The conflicts have also been blamed on lifetime contracts between pilots and state-owned airlines, which require pilots to pay a large sum of money if they want to quit.

The CAAC East China Regional Administration issued a regulation that took effect on April 1 stipulating that an airline can not lose more than one percent of its pilots annually. It also states that a pilot should pay compensation between 700,000 yuan and 2.1 million yuan to an airline for quitting.

(Shanghai Daily April 7, 2008)