The air transport restrictions between Taiwan and Macau will soon be lifted after the two sides signed a new aviation agreement yesterday.
The Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) said the pact was signed in Macau by Lu Chang-shui (盧長水), director of the Mainland Affairs Council’s Macau affairs department, and Macau Economic and Cultural Office in Taiwan Director Nadia Leong (梁潔芝).
The new agreement will replace the one signed in 2001 between the Taipei Airlines Association and Air Macau, the CAA said.
Currently, the number of passenger seats provided by each side is capped at 19,400 per week, while carriers on each side can deliver 400 tonnes of air cargo per week.
All the caps will be removed after the aviation pact takes effect, the CAA said.
“Carriers on both sides can decide the number of the flights they plan to dispatch depending on market demand,” it added. “The new pact does not list the names of carriers designated to operate the Taiwan-Macau flights. Each side can decide the carriers that are entitled to offer the service.”
The new agreement will also regulate charter flights between Taiwan and Macau.
Based on the new pact, carriers can apply to operate regular charter flights between Macau and the airports in Greater Taichung, Taitung, Magong, Kinmen, Greater Tainan or Chiayi. No cap will be placed on any of these flight services either.
Passenger flights to Macau are offered by EVA Air, TranAsia Airways and Mandarin Airlines in Taiwan, as well as Air Macau. The Taiwanese carriers jointly offer approximately 82 flights per week, whereas the Macanese airline offers about 35 flights per week.
No carrier currently offers cargo service.
From 2011 to last year, the average occupancy rate for Taiwan-Macau flights was 70.6 percent. Market analysts said the new pact would encourage more carriers to enter the market.
Unlike the old agreement signed between carriers, the Mainland Affairs Council said the new aviation pact was signed by government officials from both sides.
The CAA said the new aviation pact would give carriers more flexibility in arranging flights and provide consumers with more options.
Taipei on Thursday held urban resilience air raid drills, with residents in one of the exercises’ three “key verification zones” reporting little to no difference compared with previous years, despite government pledges of stricter enforcement. Formerly known as the Wanan exercise, the air raid drills, which concluded yesterday, are now part of the “Urban Resilience Exercise,” which also incorporates the Minan disaster prevention and rescue exercise. In Taipei, the designated key verification zones — where the government said more stringent measures would be enforced — were Songshan (松山), Zhongshan (中山) and Zhongzheng (中正) districts. Air raid sirens sounded at 1:30pm, signaling the
Environmental groups yesterday filed an appeal with the Executive Yuan, seeking to revoke the environmental impact assessment (EIA) conditionally approved in February for the Hsieh-ho Power Plant’s planned fourth liquefied natural gas (LNG) receiving station off the coast of Keelung. The appeal was filed jointly by the Protect Waimushan Seashore Action Group, the Wild at Heart Legal Defense Association and the Keelung City Taiwan Head Cultural Association, which together held a news conference outside the Executive Yuan in Taipei. Explaining the reasons for the appeal, Wang Hsing-chih (王醒之) of the Protect Waimushan Seashore Action Group said that the EIA failed to address
The number of people who reported a same-sex spouse on their income tax increased 1.5-fold from 2020 to 2023, while the overall proportion of taxpayers reporting a spouse decreased by 4.4 percent from 2014 to 2023, Ministry of Finance data showed yesterday. The number of people reporting a spouse on their income tax trended upward from 2014 to 2019, the Department of Statistics said. However, the number decreased in 2020 and 2021, likely due to a drop in marriages during the COVID-19 pandemic and the income of some households falling below the taxable threshold, it said. The number of spousal tax filings rebounded
A saleswoman, surnamed Chen (陳), earlier this month was handed an 18-month prison term for embezzling more than 2,000 pairs of shoes while working at a department store in Tainan. The Tainan District Court convicted Chen of embezzlement in a ruling on July 7, sentencing her to prison for illegally profiting NT$7.32 million (US$248,929) at the expense of her employer. Chen was also given the opportunity to reach a financial settlement, but she declined. Chen was responsible for the sales counter of Nike shoes at Tainan’s Shinkong Mitsukoshi Zhongshan branch, where she had been employed since October 2019. She had previously worked
RSS