Air traffic on South Korea-China routes nearly halved in July from a year ago in the wake of Beijing's retaliation against Seoul's deployment of an advanced US missile shield, government data showed Wednesday.

The number of passengers on Chinese routes operated by domestic carriers came to 1.12 million last month, down 45.2 percent from the 2.04 million posted during the same month last year, according to the data from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport.

In mid-March, China banned the sale of group tours to South Korea as part of its apparent retaliation against the installation of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system here.

Seoul and Washington insist THAAD is purely designed to counter missile threats from North Korea, but Beijing suspects the system with a powerful radar system could be used to spy on the Chinese military.
 

Despite the tumble, South Korea's overall air traffic fell 1.5 percent from a year ago to 9.36 million in July thanks to increased passengers on routes to the rest of the world.

The number of passengers on international routes declined 2.2 percent on-year to 6.58 million last month, with the figure for domestic routes inching up 0.3 percent to 2.79 million.

The number of passengers on Japanese, European and Southeast Asian routes surged 27.9 percent, 13.5 percent and 12.9 percent, respectively, offsetting the sharp drop in air traffic on Chinese routes, the data showed.

Overall, people taking international flights rose on-year from April-June, backed by the government's implementation in April of emergency countermeasures.

In a bid to tackle falling air traffic, the ministry has recently come up with additional measures to attract more foreign tourists through international airports in provincial cities.

Meanwhile, the country's air cargo traffic stood at 360,000 tons in July, up 3.8 percent from a year earlier, according to the data. (Yonhap)