There was tragedy on Saturday when two workers were killed and dozens of others injured in a bus crash on a Shanghai-Nanjing expressway. Traffic was severely affected after the accident.

The country's airports have been busy, with domestic airlines transporting 5.43 million passengers between January 22 and 28, an increase of 7.2 percent compared to last year, the Civil Aviation Administration of China said yesterday.

Flights to Hong Kong and Macao were the most popular, the regulator said, with flights to Hong Kong 80 percent full and those to Macau flights even busier at 95 percent capacity.

However, many passengers had been stranded in south China due to bad weather last week.

More than 100 flights, mostly domestic, were cancelled or delayed at south China airports over the weekend because of heavy fog and rain.

Earlier, about 5,000 passengers were stranded at Meilan International Airport in Hainan Province on Friday after 111 flights were canceled.

Some angry passengers tried to get on to the runway in protest, but were stopped by airport police. No flights were affected by the protest.

Carriers added more than 100 flights yesterday to transport the passengers as the fog cleared.

In Guangdong Province, eight departing and three arriving flights were cancelled on Friday night at Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport because of poor visibility.

Shanghai Airport Authority said yesterday that the city's two airports handled more than 1.27 million passengers during the holiday, a 7.29 percent increase over the same period of last year.