The Civil Aviation Administration (CAA) said yesterday that the Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC) has rejected its proposal to immediately suspend flights between Taipei and Chiayi.
Meanwhile, the CAA was further instructed to evaluate the performance of each domestic flight route and submit a comprehensive report to the ministry.
CAA vice director Lin Shinn-der (
Lin said that since the flight schedule for next month has been finalized, Taipei-Chiayi flights could be canceled in September or October.
Currently, Uni Air is the only carrier operating the Taipei-Chiayi route. Last month the carrier reported that the passenger occupancy percentage had slipped to 28 percent. Starting this month, the number of Taipei-Chiayi flights has further dropped to two per day.
Lin said the airline has tried to work with travel service providers to bring travelers to Chiayi, but the county itself lacks popular tourists spots to attract travelers.
"It [the airline] will `bleed' if the ticket price goes down any further," he said.
On the other hand, Lin said Uni will offer service between Taipei and Hengchun (
According to Lin, passengers traveling through Taichung Airport have grown tremendously in recent years because many airlines have developed charter flight services to Japan or Southeast Asian countries.
For the moment, Uni only has one quota in Taichung because of its charter flight to Japan. Once the agreement takes effect, the flight departure quota will be increased to three.
Lin also announced yesterday that quite a few weekly flights had been canceled for August because of Ghost Month, which officially begins on the 13th of next month.
Among the most significant cuts, 20 weekly flights have been cut from Taipei to Tainan, 14 from Taipei to Magong (
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,