Opinion | Cathay Pacific should not be scapegoat for Hong Kong’s aviation woes

In an interview with the Post last month, Secretary for Transport and Logistics Lam Sai-hung basically threw Cathay Pacific Airways, the city’s flag carrier, under the bus. Insiders are suggesting that the government will not wait any longer for Cathay to recover and will instead push ahead with looking for other carriers to fill the extra capacity created by the opening of the third runway.

Releasing its interim report last week, Cathay announced plans to invest more than HK$100 billion (US$12.8 billion) by adding more aircraft to its fleet along with other upgrades, to meet the opportunities the new runway is expected to provide.

The government’s love-hate relationship with Cathay is telling on different levels. Whenever Hong Kong’s status as an aviation hub is called into question, officials offer knee-jerk denials and point to the airport being poised to return to pre-pandemic traffic levels.

It is as if they are concerned about having enough traffic to justify building the third runway. Of late, the government seems to be trying to pre-empt this by blaming Cathay’s slower-than-expected recovery. The airline has pushed back its target of reaching full capacity by three months, from the end of this year to the first quarter of 2025, but that will hardly drag down the industry.

Cathay definitely has a role to play in Beijing’s plans for Hong Kong. However, if we look at the airline’s rate of recovery since the city reopened, it seems unlikely that it is to blame for the airport’s failure to return to pre-pandemic numbers. Neither should it be the source of the government’s anxieties.