The Ministry of Foreign Affairs won't interfere with China Airlines' (CAL's) purchase of engines for its new aircraft, a senior official said yesterday.
Spokesman Richard Shih (
"We respect CAL's decision based on commercial and professional evaluations," Shih said.
Since the aircraft-engine procurement plan was unveiled, Shih said, the British and US representative offices have on many occasions expressed their concerns about the plan.
"They have expressed their hopes that their companies would be given equal opportunities in a fair and just competition for this order," Shih said.
Shih made the remarks a day after British representative to Taipei Derek Marsh and EU representative to Taipei Brian McDonald jointly called on Secretary General to the President Chiou I-jen (邱義仁) to express concerns that Rolls Royce was being unfairly shut out of the engine deal.
Chiou refused to comment on what transpired in his talks with the two officials.
According to media reports, CAL originally planned to purchase Rolls Royce's engines for its 12 Airbus A330-300s but later decided to order engines from US manufacturers General Electric or Pratt and Whitney because it would have to pay an additional US$20 million in aircraft airworthiness certification fees should it use Rolls Royce engines.
Airbus reportedly informed the airline last week that it will have to pay the engine certification fee if it wants to use Rolls Royce's TREND768 engine.
Indonesia's Garuda Airline is the only company to use this type of engine at present. If CAL decides to use the TREND768 engine, it will have to obtain US and EU certification and it will have to foot the certification bills, Airbus reportedly told CAL.
CAL has debunked all media reports about its engine deal as groundless speculation.
"The deal is still under discussion, and no final decision has been reached yet," a spokesman said.
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