Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport will enter a new era today when it becomes a state-run company, a move aimed at enhancing the airport’s efficiency and improving its tarnished image following repeated glitches and heavy criticism of its services.
Instilling a “business management spirit” through the airport’s corporatization is one of the ways the government hopes to enhance the airport’s management and develop the facility’s adjacent areas, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications said in a statement on Saturday.
The airport, which has been a government agency since it opened in 1979, has suffered repeated malfunctions in recent months, including leaky bathrooms, defective jetways and a breakdown of the automatic baggage handling system.
Former Civil Aeronautics Administration director-general Chang Yu-hern (張有恆), the convener of a government task force aimed at improving the airport’s services, has said the government would make the airport one of the world’s top 10 airports within three years. It currently ranks No. 27 in the world.
The ministry will hold a ceremony today to mark the formation of the new company, which it said was the result of a government plan last year to renovate the airport.
The government will also invest NT$67 billion (US$2.2 billion) in the construction of a third terminal for the airport, which is scheduled for completion by 2018.
By that time, the airport is estimated to serve 75 million passengers per year, with the third terminal able to handle 43 million, the ministry projected.
However, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Tsao Erh-chang (曹爾忠) recently expressed skepticism over the ministry’s projections, saying the international airport had only handled 24 million travelers so far this year.
Costa Rica sent a group of intelligence officials to Taiwan for a short-term training program, the first time the Central American country has done so since the countries ended official diplomatic relations in 2007, a Costa Rican media outlet reported last week. Five officials from the Costa Rican Directorate of Intelligence and Security last month spent 23 days in Taipei undergoing a series of training sessions focused on national security, La Nacion reported on Friday, quoting unnamed sources. The Costa Rican government has not confirmed the report. The Chinese embassy in Costa Rica protested the news, saying in a statement issued the same
Taiwan’s Liu Ming-i, right, who also goes by the name Ray Liu, poses with a Chinese Taipei flag after winning the gold medal in the men’s physique 170cm competition at the International Fitness and Bodybuilding Federation Asian Championship in Ajman, United Arab Emirates, yesterday.
A year-long renovation of Taipei’s Bangka Park (艋舺公園) began yesterday, as city workers fenced off the site and cleared out belongings left by homeless residents who had been living there. Despite protests from displaced residents, a city official defended the government’s relocation efforts, saying transitional housing has been offered. The renovation of the park in Taipei’s Wanhua District (萬華), near Longshan Temple (龍山寺), began at 9am yesterday, as about 20 homeless people packed their belongings and left after being asked to move by city personnel. Among them was a 90-year-old woman surnamed Wang (王), who last week said that she had no plans
TO BE APPEALED: The environment ministry said coal reduction goals had to be reached within two months, which was against the principle of legitimate expectation The Taipei High Administrative Court on Thursday ruled in favor of the Taichung Environmental Protection Bureau in its administrative litigation against the Ministry of Environment for the rescission of a NT$18 million fine (US$609,570) imposed by the bureau on the Taichung Power Plant in 2019 for alleged excess coal power generation. The bureau in November 2019 revised what it said was a “slip of the pen” in the text of the operating permit granted to the plant — which is run by Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) — in October 2017. The permit originally read: “reduce coal use by 40 percent from Jan.
RSS