Technical difficulties delay CAL flights

More than 3,000 passengers were stranded at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport yesterday morning as the China Airline (CAL) check-in system at Terminal 1 was down for four hours.

A total of 19 CAL flights were postponed because of the technical problem, which began at about 5:30am.

The flights that were delayed were scheduled to head to cities in Japan, South Korea and countries in Southeast Asia.

The company activated its manual check-in mechanism and managed to fix the technical error by 9:30am.

However, the incident continued to affect other takeoffs until 11:30am.

On average, the takeoff for each flight was delayed by about an hour.

Some returning flights from Thailand and Japan were also delayed by about two hours.

CAL spokesman Bruce Chen (陳鵬宇) said the mainframe of its check-in system, made by IBM, went out of order early yesterday morning. The mainframe connects the company's check-in systems worldwide, he said.

Chen said passengers were entitled to ask for compensation if they could provide substantial evidence proving their losses resulted from the incident.

As of press time, technical staff from IBM were still trying to determine the cause of the problem, he said.