Flying into the Year of the Horse: How GE Aerospace Helped Airlines Get Millions Home Safely During China’s Spring Festival Season

It was February 16, Lunar New Year’s Eve in China, and airports were packed with travelers rushing home to ring in the Year of the Fire Horse with their loved ones. In a record-breaking Spring Festival travel season — a 40-day period known as Chunyun that saw more than 94 million air passenger trips in 2026, according to China’s Ministry of Transport — there was hardly a worse time for a grounded aircraft. Yet that was the challenge when crews at an airline customer discovered a technical issue during a routine engine maintenance check on one of their narrowbody jets.

Cue the rapid-response maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) team at GE Aerospace. 

“We aligned quickly with the airline on the safest operational path forward,” recalls Shuyi Liu, a trainee in GE Aerospace’s Technical Commercial Leadership Program doing a rotation in Field Service at the time. Part-replacement was one option, but analysis by Liu suggested that a full engine swap was the fastest, most cost-effective solution — and she was ready to make it happen. 

“Ahead of the peak, we worked with the operator to proactively plan their maintenance removals for the CFM56-5B fleet and tried to make sure more spare engines were available,” says Liu. “The focus throughout was to respond rapidly, work transparently with the airline’s engineering and materials teams, and do everything we could to shorten aircraft downtime.”

The collaborative effort paid off. Schedule interruptions were minimized, and passengers arrived at their destinations safely — in time to enjoy celebrations that have been part of Chinese culture for millennia.

Acing a Test of Resilience

Preparedness is everything for transportation partners supporting China’s peak travel season, and GE Aerospace has been one of them for the past 45 years. Today GE Aerospace and CFM International, a 50-50 joint company between GE Aerospace and Safran Aircraft Engines, serve more than 60 airlines — with over 8,500 engines in service and nearly 4,600 more on order — in the greater China region. 

“Each year, the Spring Festival carries the hopes of millions of families reuniting, and it is the time when our airline customers most need our support to keep the fleet flying,” says Jianfeng Wu, Greater China regional general manager for customer experience. “We are honored to play an active role during this period, working alongside our customers, using FLIGHT DECK* to forecast the need, and executing the MRO engine returns, new spare engine delivery, and lease engine allocation, to help ensure safe and stable operations through the 2026 peak travel season.” 

Meeting demand during what’s considered the largest human migration on the planet requires year-round planning, with preparations for the next festival season beginning almost immediately once the current one ends. Fleet managers at GE Aerospace analyze historic operational and fleet data, then team up with airlines to predict future pain points and start taking steps to eliminate them: Logistics teams look at reallocating global resources, MRO teams optimize maintenance schedules, and manufacturing teams review new engine orders.

This year, to keep communication flowing seamlessly between various teams at the airlines and those at GE Aerospace and CFM — field service engineers, materials supply experts, and MRO shops, for example — a new communications system was put in place. Daily, weekly, and monthly work-session schedules were set up to improve the timeliness and continuity of information exchanged during the peak period, which helped the teams to respond even faster to customer needs.

“I maintained a steady operations cadence with engineers from an operator customer — at least one touchpoint every half day — to stay aligned on troubleshooting progress, keep information moving quickly, and act as a bridge between the airline team and our product support engineer colleagues,” says Jicheng Fan, a senior airline field service engineer.  

“During the Spring Festival peak, you feel the customer’s operational pressure in a very direct way,” says He Liu, a lead airline field service engineer who at one point stayed overnight at a customer site to help the operator troubleshoot a problem right before the Chunyun rush. “We try to think from the customer’s perspective at every step — coordinating engineering support, pushing for faster technical response, and working with the airline to analyze options.” 

Senior Staff Engineer Raymond Peng sums up the mission mindset that guided GE Aerospace teams successfully through Chunyun this year. “Supporting airlines through Spring Festival meant more than just solving technical problems,” he says. “It was about helping millions of passengers get home on time, and demonstrating what close partnership, fast decision-making, and shared trust can achieve under pressure.”

* FLIGHT DECK is GE Aerospace’s proprietary lean operating model.