On Tuesday night, the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) completed the allocation of additional cross-strait passenger and cargo flights between the nation’s five carriers, with China Airlines (華航, CAL) and EVA Airways (長榮, EVA) coming out of the negotiations the two big winners.
Talks over the allocation of the new cross-strait flights began on Monday after the CAA and the Chinese Aviation Administration agreed last week to raise the number of cross-strait weekly passenger flights from 270 to 370. Both sides also agreed to raise the number of weekly cargo flights from 28 to 48.
Taiwan’s five domestic carriers will share 50 newly-added flights, including 14 weekly flights between Taipei Songshan Airport and Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport.
The distribution of the 14 weekly Taipei-Hongqiao flights was settled on Monday night after five hours of negotiation.
CAL and EVA Airways were each granted six weekly flights from Taipei to Hongqiao. TransAsia Airways (復興航空) received two weekly flights.
However, in exchange, TransAsia’s flights to Shanghai, which depart from Taipei, will be moved to Taichung.
Currently, Taipei Songshan Airport can only accommodate Boeing-757 aircraft — which carry 200 passengers — or smaller. TransAsia has mainly Airbus 321 airplanes which can carry 186 passengers.
The CAA agreed to allow both CAL and EVA use smaller aircraft from their subsidiaries — Mandarin Airlines (華信航空) and Uni Air (立榮航空) respectively — on the Taipei-Hongqiao route.
The distribution of the other 36 flights was also settled on Tuesday night. Specifically, weekly flights from Taoyuan International Airport to Shenzhen were raised from 10 to 14, with CAL and Uni Air each awarded five flights. Meanwhile, CAL will have two weekly flights from Kaohsiung to Shenzhen, whereas Uni Air will have two weekly flights from Taichung to Shenzhen.
Flights to Beijing from Taoyuan were also raised from 10 to 14. CAL and EVA Airways will each have seven weekly flights.
The other 28 flights will be shared by all the carriers. CAL and Mandarin have 11 weekly flights, as does EVA Airways and Uni Air. TransAsia has six flights.
CAA director-general Lee Lung-wen (李龍文) said the carriers were satisfied with the arrangement, adding that the flights were distributed after considering the fleet size of each carrier and their record of compliance with government policy.
Lee also said that he informed the carriers they would be expected to consider public opinion when pricing cross-strait flights.
“They cannot concentrate on making money and we take the blame,” Lee said.
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
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,
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