Far Eastern Air Transport could face a partial or complete suspension of its flight services if it fails to improve its operations within a designated period of time, the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) said yesterday.
The nation’ aviation authority sent an official warning to the domestic carrier on Monday evening after several lawmakers at the legislature’s Transportation Committee questioned the safety of the airline.
According to the agency, the airline reported that one of its aircraft experienced an in-flight shutdown on a flight from Taipei to Kinmen on April 13, which the airline said was caused by a bird strike.
An in-flight shutdown means that the aircraft’s engine shuts down when the aircraft is in the air. The incident can occur if an aircraft’s engine malfunctions, or it could be initiated by the flight crew for safety reasons.
On April 16, another Taipei-Kinmen flight was delayed for more than two hours after a signaling system abnormality was detected on the aircraft’s dashboard.
On Thursday last week, the airline was accused of continuing to offer flights from Kaohsiung to Guiyang City in China, despite a large crack in the windshield of the cockpit caused by a hailstone.
Although the airline had informed the CAA about these incidents, the agency said it had yet to see the airline adopt higher standards to address safety issues.
In addition to two senior flight safety inspectors, the agency decided to dispatch two other inspectors to the company to ensure that it follows all aspects of the aviation safety protocol laid out by the government.
Founded in 1957, the airline initially offered both domestic and international flight services. However, after a series of financial crises in 2008, the airline suspended flights for three years and only restarted services in 2011.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching