Airline services between Taipei and Kaohsiung, once the busiest domestic route, are to be discontinued from the end of next month, as the high-speed rail has taken over most of the commuter traffic connecting the two cities, Vice Minister of Transportation and Communications Yeh Kuang-shih (葉匡時) said yesterday.
Mandarin Airlines, the only carrier still operating the route, is to terminate its services between Taipei in the north of the country and Kaohsiung in the south after Aug. 31, Yeh said.
He said the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) has agreed to Mandarin Air’s request to close its route service, but that the final decision lies with the ministry, under which the CAA falls.
Yeh said he expects the ministry to endorse the CAA’s decision by next week because the carrier’s request appears reasonable.
Since the launch of the high-speed railway service in 2007, the airline has complained of shrinking passenger loads on its Taipei-Kaohsiung flights, he said.
The average passenger load on each of the carrier’s three weekly flights totals about 30 percent and even then, around half of the passengers are company employees or their relatives, flying on discounted tickets, Mandarin Airline executives said.
The airline said it is losing NT$20 million (US$667,600) per year on the route.
The high-speed rail, which runs north to south along the western corridor of the country, has forced the closure of several other domestic air routes.
After the Taipei-Kaohsiung flights are discontinued, Mandarin Airlines will begin offering three additional flights per week between Taipei and the eastern county of Taitung, the executives said.
With the closing of air services between Taipei and Kaohsiung, the remaining domestic flights will serve the outlying islands of Kinmen, Matsu and Penghu, the mountainous eastern counties of Hualien and Taitung as well as Hengchun (恆春) in southern Taiwan’s Pingtung County.
Apart from Mandarin Airlines, the other domestic carriers are Uni Air, Trans Asia Airways and Far Eastern Air.
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,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods