Amid a barrage of criticism on the maintenance of the nation's airports, the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) yesterday said that bad weather -- and not poorly maintained runways -- were responsible for five accidents at domestic airports within four years.
"We test the pavement in Taipei's Sungshan Airport every month," said CAA Director-General Billy Chang (
Chang's comment came a day after the Aviation Safety Council published their survey and identified five accidents in which aircraft skidded across runways. The accidents occurred at the Chiayi Airport (
"Among the nation's 18 airports, only the CKS International Airport meets the standards laid out by the International Civil Aviation Organization," said Kay Yong (
But the CAA refuted the council's report as one-sided, and said it neglected multiple factors involved in each case.
"For instance, the plane skidded out of track at Sungshan Airport because it landed in heavy rain and strong wind. The council shouldn't underestimate the weather's influence," Chang said.
For three other cases, the CAA explained that they applied the Surface Friction Tester, an internationally recognized piece of Swedish-made equipment, to assess the slipperiness of the runways at Hsiaokang International Airport once every fortnight. For larger domestic airports, another piece of equipment, the British-made Grip Tester, is used to test the skid resistance every three months, the CAA 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:
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