A government plan to establish a commercial service center at Taipei Songshan Airport has drawn investors from abroad, with reports that a Houston-based business aviation service provider expressed an interest in operating the center during a meeting with Deputy Minister of Transportation and Communications Yeh Kuang-shih (葉匡時) yesterday.
Yeh said he met representatives from Universal Weather and Aviation Pvt Ltd, which specializes in offering integrated solutions for the business aviation sector.
“It [the company] is targeting Taiwanese businesspeople who make frequent cross-strait travel,” Yeh said. “The company also claims that Taiwan has an opportunity to catch up with Hong Kong within five years after the commercial service center begins to operate.”
Yeh said he was told that Hong Kong handles about 4,200 small private aircraft annually.
Universal does not own any jets and simply offers business aviation services, such as the arrangement of landing and department schedules of private aircraft, Yeh said.
At present, neither Taiwan nor China allows commercial jet companies to handle cross-strait flights. Both only allow civil aviation carriers, individuals owning private aircraft as well as those offering humanitarian flights to operate across the Taiwan Strait.
Whether commercial aircraft could operate freely between Taiwan and China would have to be settled through cross-strait negotiations, Yeh said.
“The two sides will meet in October and this [the commercial jet service] will be listed on the agenda,” he said.
Yeh added that the Civil Aviation Act (民用航空法) would have to be amended to facilitate the development of the commercial jet service industry
“The act does not allow overseas commercial jet carriers to provide domestic transportation services,” Yeh said. “So if an entrepreneur wants to fly between Taipei and Kaohsiung, he would not be able to do that unless he secures special permission from the government.”
Yeh said countries like the US and Japan already allow foreign commercial carriers to operate domestic flight routes, provided the flights originate or end abroad and all passengers are traveling from or to another country.
Cross-strait negotiations on the matter would be much more difficult, Yeh said.
Aside from Universal, Yeh said the ministry would review several other potential candidates before making any decision.
In related news, the ministry said it would soon send a team to Dubai to observe how it managed to attract 5,000 investors to its free-trade port within a period of 25 years.
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