The shadow of grief lingered over Lindu Airport in Yichun, a remote mountainous city in northeast China, Friday as relatives awaited the DNA results that would identify the bodies of loved ones killed in the country's deadliest commercial plane crash since 2004.

An Airbus 320, owned by China Southern Airlines, landed in the early afternoon, the second arrival since the airport reopened the previous day.

Only 48 passengers were aboard the aircraft, which has more than 100 seats. Some were the next of kin of crash victims.

Until Monday, the small, forest-surrounded airport in a mountain valley in Heilongjiang Province, 9 km from the downtown area, had been busy with large crowds of holidaymakers and business travelers.

The city known as China's "capital of woodlands" is an idyllic resort from June to September. Local residents said air tickets to Yichun were hard-won in summer and passengers needed to make reservations at least two days in advance to secure an economy class seat.

The brief travel rush, which lasts no more than four months a year, seems a good reason to build an airport in Yichun, though the city is only two and a half hours' drive from the nearest airport in the neighboring city of Jiamusi.

Friday marks the first anniversary of the airport's inauguration.

The date could have been marked with fanfare and ambitions for more regional airports in the border province, if not for the plane crash.

A Brazilian-made ERJ-190 turbine jet run by Henan Airlines broke into two after it crashed on landing at Lindu Airport Tuesday night. Fifty-four people survived with injuries, including the pilot.

By Friday, no progress has been reported of the government probe, except an announcement from the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) Thursday that the flight recorders had been sent to Beijing for data analysis.

The CAAC said in a brief dispatch Friday it had launched a safety overhaul at all domestic airlines.

About 30 ERJ-190s are in operation on the Chinese mainland, including five owned by Henan Airlines and 25 by Tianjin Airlines.

Within 24 hours of the accident, another ERJ-190 overshot the runway on landing Wednesday in Nanning, southern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

The Tianjin Airlines aircraft was en route from Xi'an in the northwestern Shaanxi Province to Nanning and was about to head for Haikou in the southern island province of Hainan.

Though authorities have published no investigation results, Chinese aviation experts have taken the accidents as an alarm for the country's rapidly expanding, yet immature, regional aviation market.

Mushrooming airports 

The number of air trips taken in China grew from 67.2 million in 2000 to 230.5 million in 2009, according to the CAAC. The number is expected to hit 260 million this year.

In tandem with the passenger flow, China has built 45 new airports between 2006 and 2010 to include smaller cities like Yichun in its fast-expanding civil aviation network, according to the CAAC.

Heilongjiang Province alone has nine airports, including Taiping Airport in Harbin and eight regional airports serving smaller cities, including Mohe on the northernmost Chinese border.

The province plans to build at least three more airports before 2015 -- and it is still not the most ambitious bidder amid the nationwide craze for expansion.

In 2011-2015 budgets submitted to the CAAC earlier this year, Sichuan Province planned to build six more airports, the central Hubei Province planned five, and Hebei Province neighboring Beijing said it needed three more regional airports.

Xinjiang, the far-flung western Uygur autonomous region with 13 airports in operation, will open four more before the end of this year and is still hoping to build another five before 2015.

According to CAAC's plan for civil airport construction, a document approved by the State Council in 2008, China will have 244 airports by 2020.

But Sha Hongjiang, a CAAC official in charge of policymaking and law, said the number would top 300, nearly double the 2009 figure of 166.

At a recent forum on China's aviation industry, Sha said China still lagged far behind developed countries in airport construction.

The United States has more than 18,000 airports, he said.

Yet in China, where for economic reasons, the absolute majority of travelers still preferred trains and buses, very few regional airports were operating in full capacity.

Of the total 166 airports in operation in 2009, the 20 biggest airports -- located in large cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and provincial capitals -- handled 80 percent of the total passenger transport.

Forty-six percent of the airports have less than four flights a day.

Last year, Lindu Airport handled 10,252 passenger trips, from its opening on Aug. 27, according to CAAC.

It is designed to handle 142,000 passenger trips a year.

"A lack of planning in airport construction, inadequate facilities and poor management could pose threat to flight safety," said an executive with the Heilongjiang branch of China Southern Airlines, the only carrier that still flies to Yichun after Henan Airlines flights were suspended after the crash.

Though Li Jian, vice director of CAAC, defended Lindu Airport's safety standards, saying it was built with the capacity to accommodate flights during the night, China Southern said in a technical circular last year it would scrap night flights after Sept. 1.

Wang Jian, secretary-general of China Civil Airports Association, said the impact of the crash would not last long as there was a huge market for regional aviation in China.

"Regional aviation benefits people in the long run," he said, citing Yushu, a Tibetan community in northwestern Qinghai Province, where an earthquake in April killed more than 2,000 people. Its new airport played an important role in transport of people and supplies in the relief work.

Safety concerns 

Regional jets are smaller inter-city planes with 50 to 110 seats and flight range between 600 and 1,200 kilometers.

According to a Henan Airlines flight schedule, the crashed ERJ-190 was its only aircraft that flew on all 10 routes in Heilongjiang Province, connecting Harbin with five small airports including Yichun, Mohe, Mudanjiang, Jiamusi and Jixi.

It flies all 10 routes every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, covering about 7,000 km from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m.

When it crashed in Yichun Tuesday, it had flown nine routes, adding up to more than 6,000 km.

A civil aviation official in Zhengzhou, where the carrier is based, confirmed it was one of all five jets owned by the Henan company.

It was not known how many crew worked on the aircraft nor whether the pilot was exhausted after long hours of flying when the disaster happened. But a passenger recognized at least one flight attendant who had been flying at 10 a.m.

"I know that man," Harbin-based office worker Wang Huaizhi yelled when he saw on sina.com, a portal website, the picture of a flight attendant who was killed in the crash Friday. "He served me tea when I was flying from Mohe to Harbin that morning."

A source from the civil aviation industry in Harbin explained small companies often had small fleets and could only draw passengers with lower ticket prices. "To make ends' meet, many buy regional planes -- which are often more risky and not as comfortable as larger jets -- and fly frequently at night," he said on condition of anonymity.

Prof. Liu Hao, an aviation specialist at Beihang University, said it was high time for an overhaul in China's regional aviation market to avoid more tragedies.

"It should involve every aircraft, every pilot and every single airport," he said.

Liu said China should also improve coordination in its airspace management.

"China's airspace is controlled by the Air Force and CAAC. As a result, there's a lack of planning and coordination that often leads to flight delays and disputes between passengers and the crew, and between airlines and airport authorities."

Many air travelers have complained flights are being delayed more often. It is common occurrence, for example, for one to wait for four hours for a flight to or from Shanghai to take off, partly because of an increase in air traffic flow brought by the World Expo.

China is one of the world's largest aircraft consumer markets. An industry report by Aviation Industry Corporation of China in 2008 showed the country needed 3,815 additional aircraft, including 2,822 jumbo jets, to its civil aviation fleet before 2027.

(Xinhua News Agency August 28, 2010)