The price of flights across the Taiwan Strait will drop after Taiwan and China agreed to raise the number of flights from 370 to 558 per week, the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) announced yesterday.
CAA Director-General Yin Chen-pong (尹承蓬) said pre-tax fares for flights to Shanghai on Taiwanese airlines could be less than NT$10,000 if they are purchased within two weeks of departure.
One-year, open-ended tickets to Shanghai will come at a discount of up to 10 percent, Yin said, adding the total cost after discount would not exceed NT$20,000.
One-year, open-ended tickets to Beijing would also receive a discount of about 10 percent and the CAA is in communication with Taiwanese carriers on the prices for 14-day tickets, Yin said.
Aside from flights to Beijing and Shanghai, fares to -second-tier or third-tier cities will also drop, Yin added.
“We hope price cuts meet public expectation,” Yin said.
Overpriced cross-strait flights have been a problem since direct cross-strait flights were launched in July 2008. The government has said on numerous occasions that -increasing the number of cross-strait flights would solve the problem.
Officials from the Straits Exchange Foundation and the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait met yesterday to discuss the increases in flights.
Each side has been given three new flights departing from Shanghai and one new flight leaving from Beijing. All are so-called “red-eye” flights, meaning that they operate late at night.
Yin said the CAA would allocate the newly acquired flights among the nation’s carriers next week.
With Far Eastern Air Transport (FAT) resuming operations in April, other carriers were expected to “return” the 15 cross-strait flights reserved for FAT that had been given to them because FAT was not operational.
However, Yin said the carriers had reached an agreement last month whereby the number of flights returned to FAT would depend on the number of aircraft available for the service.
“They [FAT] must be ready to provide the cross-strait service within four months after the agreement takes effect,” Yin said. “They can have all 15 cross-strait flights if they have at least nine aircraft ready. They can have only five or 10 flights given back to them if they only have three to six aircraft in service.”
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift