The first stage of a re-examination administered by the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) to 71 TransAsia Airways pilots to test their capability to fly ATR 72-600 aircraft began at Taipei International Airport (Songshan airport) yesterday.
The first stage of the test consisted of an oral examination focusing on basic piloting knowledge and the procedures pilots are to follow during an engine failure. The second stage is scheduled to be conducted overseas on a flight simulator for ATR 72 aircraft, the administration said.
All 71 pilots are required to complete the first stage of the test by Tuesday; those who fail either stage would be indefinitely relieved of their duties until they are retrained and pass the tests, the CAA said.
Photo: Wang Min-wei, Taipei Times
The second test is scheduled to begin before the Lunar New Year holiday and is estimated to be completed by the middle of next month. Possible testing venues include Bangkok, Singapore and Hong Kong, the CAA added.
TransAsia Airways president Fred Wu (吳滬生) told a press conference in Taipei yesterday that his company had canceled 90 domestic flights, due to pilots’ re-examinations.
He said the company would do its best to help travelers whose travel plans have been disrupted to acquire train tickets, in particular those who plan to travel to Hualien.
The company has set aside NT$12 million (US$379,027) for compensation, of which NT$8 million has been claimed by family members of 40 passengers killed or injured in Wednesday’s crash in Taipei, Wu said.
An additional NT$1.2 million is planned to be issued to the family members of each deceased passenger to assist with the cost of funerals, he said.
When asked for comment on the CAA’s re-examinations, National Taiwan Ocean University professor and former Aviation Safety Council deputy minister Michael Gau (高聖惕) said the move was “understandable,” but that the move might not directly address the issues that caused the accident, the specifics of which would require a wait of at least four months for a detailed analysis of information contained in the aircraft’s flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder.
Commenting on preliminary investigation results that indicate the cause of the crash was human error, Gau said: “It seems that TransAsia’s pilots are not very accomplished. I can understand the CAA’s move [to test the pilots]. It has to show some response; otherwise, it risks becoming the subject of public criticism.”
In related news, five more bodies were recovered during yesterday’s search, raising the death toll to 40 and reducing the number of passengers still unaccounted for to three.
Four bodies were identified: Chen Yijung (陳藝榕), a Chinese female; Chen Mei-jung (陳美榮), a Taiwanese female; Yu Ya-she (余亞舍), a Taiwanese male; and Yeh Chia-ching (葉家菁), a female flight attendant from Taiwan.
A male body was still being identified as of press time last night.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the