Saturday's China Airlines' disaster has triggered a panic at Hong Kong's airport as customers who have already booked CAL flights scramble to cancel their tickets and take alternative flights, according to Hong Kong media.
The Chinese-language Ming Pao (明報) reported yesterday that famous entertainer Chou Yu-min (周渝民), a member of the Taiwanese pop band F4, changed his flight. Chou canceled a CAL ticket from Hong Kong to Taiwan yesterday and flew with another carrier, the report said.
PHOTO: GEORGE TSORNG, TAIPEI TIMES
"If I had a choice, I would certainly not choose CAL. So many accidents would scare anyone," the report quoted another Taiwanese traveler surnamed Hsu (許) as saying.
PHOTO: GEORGE TSORNG, TAIPEI TIMES
Some relatives of the Hong Kong passengers who boarded the ill-fated CAL flight on Saturday rejected the carrier's offer to fly them to Taiwan on its own aircraft, forcing the company to arrange a Cathay Pacific flight for them.
Saturday's crash was CAL's 10th fatal accident since 1970, and is likely to be the second most serious in the company's history.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Meanwhile, Joseph Tung (
Six Hong Kong passengers were among the 225 people on board, but the flight was not carrying any tour groups organized by Hong Kong travel agencies.
According to Tung, dozens of tour groups consisting of several thousand people travel from Hong Kong to Taiwan each week. The number of Hong Kong tourists visiting Taiwan has risen steadily since Taiwan began to offer Hong Kong's citizens 14-day tourist visas upon arrival in August last year, Tung said.
The Hong Kong-Taipei route has more than 200 flights per week. CAL, along with Cathay Pacific, has dominated the route, but a new air deal under negotiation is expected to give a large portion of additional flights to rival EVA Airways Corp (
More than 320,000 people from Hong Kong visited Taiwan last year, a 22 percent increase from the year before. In the first quarter of this year, more than 80,000 people from Hong Kong visited Taiwan and some 190,000 Taiwanese visited Hong Kong.
Apart from tourists, Taiwanese businessmen operating in China also stop over in Hong Kong on their way in and out of China, due to a lack of direct transportation links between Taiwan and China.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching