Airline's execs punished for lady's visit in cockpit

Eight senior executives from Air Guilin were punished after one of its pilots had been banned from flying for life for inviting a young woman into the cockpit during a flight earlier this year.

A document from the company on Tuesday showed that Yue Ding, general manager of its flight operation department, was removed from his post, and Xu Xin, chairman of the airline, was given a serious warning.

Additionally, serious demerits were handed out to the general manager of the airline, the deputy general manager of the plane maintenance department and the safety director, as well as the general managers of the cabin and crew services department, the aviation security department and the safety inspection department.

The seven executives who remained in their posts were also fined three months' salary, it added.

The punishment against the executives, who weren't directly involved in the incident, sends a clear message that the company is taking the incident very seriously and also warns that anything that might jeopardize flight safety must not happen, said Diao Weimin, professor of aviation law at the China Aviation Management Institute of China.

"Punishment for misbehavior that puts hundreds of passengers at risk can never be too severe. Safety must always come first," Diao said.

He said that though the incident did not cause any actual losses, it was a defiance of laws and regulations that had a negative social impact and damaged the airline's image, so the punishment for the executives is not excessive, he added.

The directive also named the captain for the first time as Su Chen and said the company had urged the Civil Aviation Administration of China to revoke his pilot's license.

The airline, a subsidiary of Hainan Airlines based in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, said in a statement earlier on Monday that it had grounded the captain for life after he allowed a female passenger into the cockpit during a flight from Guilin to Yangzhou, Jiangsu province, in January.

The latest document also made it clear that the rest of the flight crew, which consisted of two copilots, two flight attendants and a safety inspector, has been demoted and suspended from flying for 12 months.

The pilot's malpractice stirred a social media outcry on Sunday when a civil aviation blogger on Sina Weibo found a picture in which the young woman, who was not wearing a uniform, was sitting inside the cockpit of a passenger plane with her fingers making a V-sign.

Guilin Tourism University later confirmed that the woman, surnamed Chen, is a junior student in its flight attendant department. Chen has deleted the original post, as well as all her other posts. The school is still looking into the case, and she has not been punished.

Diao also said that the public security department should give the female passenger administrative detention or fine her, since to some degree she had endangered the safety of people on board.

Shi Ruipeng contributed to this story.