Research On Legal Liability Issue On Flight Delay In China

With superb convenience and highly efficiency, air transport has become an important way of transport in nowadays and is been widely adopted by normal people. But currently the flight delay is getting worth, which has weaken this advantage to some degree. On one side, flight delay will hurt commercial profits of traveler, increase their travel burden; on the other side, it also made bad influence on financial profit of aircraft carrier. International wide, a lot developed countries have already established sets of completed regulations about aviation management under the framework of series of international conventions. But in China, the aviation legal system introduced relatively later. As international conventions only providing principle guidance, there are many cases that our current process unable to meet, including clearly identify the obligation fulfillment after flight delays, while leaving the liability to local court and regulations. The hysteresis of legislation not only affect the rights of passengers, but also not conducive to the development of airline and aviation industry. For example, when aviation delay happened, there is no legal document to protect the right of affected customers, no clear definition of aviation delay, uncertainty of compensation amount, eventually will hurt the reputation of aircraft carriers, decrease the their competitively, and there for will impact the overall survival and development of air transport industry. With the decline in aviation punctuality, more and more conflicts and disputes appeared because of aviation delays. Therefore, this paper propose that it will be very important in both theory and practice purpose to improve the liability regime for flight delays.Flight delay is a violation of delay in performance, which belongs to Civil law problem. This paper utilized basic principles of civil law, theory of contract law, combined with international and domestic laws and regulations on the responsibility of flight delays, analyzed the current management of the airline industry and the impact of the most common problem of delayed flights biggest liability regime, tried to analyze the current existing problems. The first capture of this paper started with an overview of the legal of liability of flight delays, distinguish flight delay by the cause, categorize it by reasonable delay and non-reasonable delay, and analyzed existing laws and regulations under current Chinese legal framework. The second capture described our current law and policy provisions related to the liability provisions of flight delays and its problems, and tried to analyze the legal responsibilities of aviation delay. Chapter3referenced to foreign law on liability for flight delays provisions, as opposed to our current existing legislative issues, summarized the revelation of foreign law to China. The last chapter tried to make relevant legislative proposal improvement based on fully consideration of the interest of the aircraft carriers and the passengers, as well as China’s national conditions, and hope can be beneficial to the flight judicial practice.