Far Eastern Air Transport’s (FAT) hopes for resuming operations dimmed as the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) said yesterday it had withdrawn the firm’s right to operate several profitable international routes.
CAA Deputy Director-General Lin Shinn-der (林信得) said FAT’s right to operate the international flights had already expired in January.
“If we do not withdraw [the rights], other airlines would say that this is really a waste of the nation’s aviation resources. So now they can go ahead and take over,” Lin said.
FAT still holds the rights to operate flights to the nation’s outlying islands and the CAA has also reserved a spot for FAT to operate cross-strait flights, Lin said.
The CAA said FAT would not be able to fly to Incheon and Jeju in Korea, U-Tapao International Airport and Phuket in Thailand, Hanoi and Da Nang in Vietnam, Bali in Indonesia, Laoag in the Philippines and Kota Kinabalu and Kuching in Malaysia. It will soon open these flights to other airlines.
The CAA ruling makes it less likely that the debt-ridden company will be able to survive following its application with the Taipei District Court to restructure its finances last year and its aircraft being impounded as collateral for banks.
The court is scheduled to rule on the application by May 16, but the airline is unlikely to be able to join negotiations for the distribution of cross-strait flights after the third cross-strait talk in Nanjing next month.
One of the topics on the agenda is whether to change from a cross-strait charter flight service to a regular cross-strait flight service. The key difference is that charter flights can be canceled if there are not enough passengers for the flight, while regular flights cannot.
In related news, Aviation Safety Council (ASC) director Yang Hung-chi (楊宏智) said yesterday that officials from Taiwan and China had been discussing cross-strait flight safety issues. He said the two sides are likely to agree that, given the special status of Taiwan-China relations, in the case of accidents involving cross-strait flights, the right to launch investigations would be determined by where the accident happened. Two designated handover points now demarcate each side’s flight control zone.
The handover point for the flights to northern China is called Sulem, which is located at 27°N and 122°E on the map. Flights to southern China must follow handover procedures at the designated flight control area near Hong Kong.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS