Tianjin Airlines

Is Tianjin Airlines safe?

Yes. Tianjin Airlines has flown since 2007, first under the name Grand China Express, without a fatal accident or the loss of an aircraft. It passes the IATA safety audit and is overseen by the same regulator as Hainan Airlines and Air China. We score it 83.

The catch is how little we can see. Tianjin publishes no fleet table or annual report of its own, and China's Civil Aviation Administration (CAAC) rarely publishes incident investigations. The clean record is real, but it rests on fewer public facts than a European or American airline of the same size would leave.

What has gone wrong at Tianjin Airlines?

The most serious event was not an accident. On 29 June 2012, six men stood up on flight GS7554, an Embraer E190 flying from Hotan to Urumqi with about 100 people on board, and announced a hijacking. According to media reports they carried explosives and tried to break into the cockpit with a crutch. Passengers and crew overpowered them, and the jet returned to Hotan. Two hijackers later died of injuries from the fight. We describe this but do not count it in the accident or incident scores: it was an attack by passengers, not a failure of the airline or its staff. Tianjin itself lists the defeat of the hijacking among its milestones.

The incidents we found in public reports are minor:

• Xi'an, July 2013. An Embraer ERJ-145 landing in rain and low visibility drifted off the runway edge with all its gear on the grass, then steered back. A tyre was cut on an edge light. No one was hurt. This is now more than ten years ago.
• Near Wuhan, July 2018. An A320 flying from Tianjin to Haikou at about 32,000 ft flew into hail, which broke an outer windshield pane and damaged the nose cone. The crew diverted to Wuhan and landed safely.
• Tianjin, May 2019. An A320 bound for Urumqi returned after take-off with a brake overheat warning. Maintenance found a faulty temperature sensor.

None of these points to a pattern. But the list is short partly because the CAAC publishes so little, so we score incidents 76, a little below Hainan, which as a listed company at least reports its own incident figures, rather than the 85 to 90 a well-documented clean record would earn.

Where did Tianjin Airlines come from?

The airline started flying in 2007 as Grand China Express, the regional arm of the HNA group, with small regional jets. It was renamed Tianjin Airlines on 8 June 2009, jointly funded by HNA Aviation Group and the Tianjin city government, and moved its base to Tianjin. It added its first A320 in 2011, its first A330 in 2016 and its hundredth aircraft in 2018.

We treat Grand China Express as the same airline under an older name, so its years count in Tianjin's record; the Aviation Safety Network data have no accident for either. Grand China Express should not be confused with Grand China Airlines, the HNA holding company that also took in China Xinhua Airlines, Chang'an Airlines and Shanxi Airlines. Those three kept their own certificates and are now subsidiaries of Hainan Airlines Holding, so their history (including a 1988 Shanxi Airlines crash at Linfen, long before Tianjin existed) is not Tianjin's.

Since December 2021, Tianjin has belonged to the restructured HNA airline group controlled by Liaoning Fangda. Hainan Airlines Holding owns a minority stake. Its 2026 half-year report shows that Tianjin, like Capital Airlines, still owes it money for maintenance and aircraft rent, and that Fangda has promised to fold Tianjin into the listed company once it meets the conditions. Money trouble is not a safety finding, but it is worth knowing about.

Embraer or Airbus: what will you fly?

The company lists 103 registered aircraft: A330s, A320-family jets and Embraer E-jets. The Airfleets fleet tracker counts fewer active aircraft and puts the average age at about 12.2 years, with the E190s and E195s near 14 years and the A320s near 10.6. These are tracker figures, not company ones. The newest aircraft are A320neos.

The E-jets fly most regional routes from Tianjin, Xi'an and Urumqi. They are fly-by-wireFly-by-wireA flight control system in which the pilot's inputs go to computers, which then move the control surfaces. Many such systems also stop unsafe manoeuvres.More in the glossary jets with a good safety record worldwide; age, not type, is what costs Tianjin points here. Long-haul flights, including Tianjin to London via Xi'an and Chongqing to Sydney, use A330s.

Who oversees Tianjin Airlines?

The CAAC. China holds Category 1FAA IASAThe US FAA's check of whether a country's aviation regulator meets ICAO standards. Category 1 means it does; Category 2 means it does not.More in the glossary in the FAA's International Aviation Safety Assessment (April 2025), no Chinese airline is on the EU Air Safety ListEU Air Safety ListThe European Commission's list of airlines banned or restricted from flying in EU airspace because they do not meet international safety standards.More in the glossary (June 2026), and China told the ICAO Assembly that its 2024 ICAO audit gave it an effective implementationICAO USOAPICAO's audit of how well each country's aviation regulator oversees safety. The result is an "effective implementation" percentage.More in the glossary score of 90.19%. Tianjin is an IATA member, which requires an IOSAIOSAThe IATA Operational Safety Audit, an international audit of an airline's safety management and operations. Every IATA member must pass it.More in the glossary audit. As for every Chinese airline, we hold oversight at 80 because the CAAC publishes few investigation reports and has released no update since March 2024 on the 2022 China Eastern crash.

Flying Tianjin Airlines in winter

Most of Tianjin's network is in northern and western China. Tianjin and Xi'an get thick winter fog and haze, and Urumqi has long, cold winters. If your flight waits for de-icing or for visibility to improve, that is the system working; frost on a wing is a known cause of crashes. On regional routes in Xinjiang, plan for weather delays and leave time before an onward connection.

How we scored it

The accident record (93) is the main strength: no fatal accident and no lost aircraft in almost 20 years. Oversight (80) and incidents (76) are held down mainly by how little China's regulator publishes, and the fleet (74) is older than at the big three Chinese airlines.