Spring Airlines
Chinese airline

Spring Airlines is a low-cost airline headquartered in Changning, Shanghai, China.
Spring Airlines is the aviation subsidiary of Shanghai Spring International Travel Service. It reported a net profit of 950 million yuan ($143 million) in 2016.
History
The airline was given approval to be established on 26 May 2004. Its first aircraft, an Airbus A320 (formerly Lotus Air's), was delivered on 12 July 2005, at Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport. Spring Airlines started operations on 18 July 2005 and the first flight on that day was between Shanghai and Yantai. Daily flights to Guilin were also initiated.
To keep operating costs low, Spring sells tickets exclusively from its ch.com website (and some designated ticket offices), bypassing travel agents. Spring no longer offers complimentary on-board meals nor complimentary water; however, passengers may purchase meals and beverages on board. In December 2006, the airline offered a 1-yuan promotional price which caused trouble with government officials.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Spring Airlines” as chinese airline. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as chinese airline. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1340408. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2016, 2004, 2005 and 2006.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Spring Airlines” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.