PIC legal liability in China
 

Posted in the Far East forum but only a chorus of crickets and tree-frogs.

In China, is there a similar situation to Japan where the PIC of an airliner experiencing a turbulence related injury or other incident will face legal prosecution or jail time? Is there a case history of an international flight crew being thrown in a "gulag" due to some incident or another? What are the repercussions like there for things like blowing an altitude and losing separation, making weather deviations under a "pan-pan", etc.

Recently started flying there regularly, and surprisingly fly with quite a few crewmembers who are, for lack of a better term, stuck in the Cold War and freaked out by communism. Yes, I wonder why they bid the trip, too. In the meantime, would like to either allay their fears and show them that they the same chance of being thrown in prison in Japan (pilots JUNIOR to me), OR scare the hell out of them to get them to NOT bid trips to ZBAA (pilots SENIOR to me).

The best thing that can happen to you in PRC is that they ban you from their airspace! :ok: it pays to contest the sentence, and suggest that 1 month ban wont be enough, it should take about 6 to 12 for the message to really sink in...

Now THAT would be a pretty good end result. What would be the dividing line between that and say, spending 15 years in a camp in Guangzhou smashing rocks with a sledgehammer?

Wearing a yellow ribbon to the hearing. its a fine line.

So a blue ribbon and a "free Tibet" t-shirt may be pushing it just a little too far?