Chinese officials are hastily rewriting the rules for their burgeoning low-altitude economy following the crash of a light plane into Beijing’s tallest building. All general and recreational aviation, including paragliding and gliding, was grounded in the wake of the incident in the late afternoon of June 26.
Some of these restrictions have since been lifted, but few details have been made public, with the government imposing a news blackout that is strict even by China standards.
The aircraft pilot, surnamed Liu, was the only fatality from the collision with the 528-meter high Citic Tower, according to reports. Another 13 people were injured and a fire broke out on lower floors.
Liu’s Chinese-made Sunward Aurora had taken off from an airfield outside Beijing and had breached the city’s permanent no-fly zone by entering one of the main business districts.
It has taken a week since the incident for police to disclose some basic details and attribute it to the pilot suffering mental health problems, specifically “insomnia and anxiety.”
Security hurdles
This points to it being framed as a “revenge against society” attack, a type of deadly protest that has emerged in the last decade or so.
The terse official announcement indicates police want to draw a line under the event. However, other agencies must now find a way to restructure this new industry while delivering the security that the regime craves.
China’s Aviation Administration has estimated low-altitude economy recorded revenue of 1.5 trillion Chinese yuan (US$221 billion) in 2025, and it expects that to reach RMB3.5 trillion ($515.5 billion) in ten years.
In the Chinese government view, the low-altitude industry encompasses drones and unmanned aircraft supported by satellite, sensing and mobile network infrastructure.
But even prior to the accident authorities were putting up hurdles. New laws introduced earlier this year forbade drones and eVTOLs from most of the capital and restricted their use elsewhere, the Financial Times reported.
Experts have noted the discrepancy between the strict rules and the regulatory and physical infrastructure to enforce them. So one consequence of the crash is inevitably going to be accelerated efforts to build management platforms that can ensure visibility and supervision of all aircraft.
One part of this would be the speeding up of the deployment of 5G-Advanced networks, given their low latency and network slicing that can support large volumes of low-altitude traffic and sensor streaming and also enable edge processing.
There is a good deal of to be regulated, but it is likely that rather than throttling the industry, the new rules and oversight regime will be rolled out progressively.