Far Eastern Air Transport (FAT) could be fined up to NT$3 million (US$99,321) for a towing collision yesterday involving two of its aircraft that delayed flights at Taipei International Airport (Songshan airport).
A FAT MD-80 being towed out of a maintenance hangar at about 6am hit a parked plane, the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) said, leading to 13 domestic flights being delayed and affecting about 1,000 passengers.
CAA Flight Standards Division director Clark Lin (林俊良) said the airline’s ground crew was towing aircraft B-28035 when its horizontal stabilizer hit aircraft B-28021, which was parked at the hangar.
Photo: CNA
While the exterior of the parked plane showed barely any damage, the horizontal stabilizer on B-28035 was damaged, and the airline needed to remove the wing tip to repair it, Lin said.
After an inspection, the airline was given permission to resume using B-28021 at 1pm, he said.
“B-28021 does not have any external damage and was permitted to fly after inspections by Boeing Co and the CAA. However, the airline will have to suspend operations of B-28035 because its horizontal stabilizer was damaged,” Lin said.
The agency is investigating the cause of the incident, and if it is determined that the airline violated aviation regulations, it could be fined between NT$600,000 and NT$3 million, and the airline’s ground crew could be fined between NT$60,000 and NT$300,000, he said.
Far Eastern Air apologized to its passengers for the inconvenience.
It promised to provide food, water and other supplies to passengers whose flights were delayed and help them transfer to flights on other airlines if there were seats available.
Lin added that the airline has an older fleet, and the agency has capped its flight hours for safety reasons.
FAT has eight MD-80s, six of which are 20 years old or older, with the other two almost as old.
The airline’s flights would be suspended if it has trouble maintaining flight safety, Lin said.
“The company has standardized operating procedures about how to tow an aircraft out of the hangar. You have one person who is charge of towing the aircraft, and ground crew on both sides of the aircraft to look out for other airplanes while it is moving out of the hangar,” he said. “The collision must have happened because of human error. How the collision happened will be the focus of our investigation.”
At issue is whether a lack of training or or a disciplinary issue contributed to the incident, the CAA said.
Additional reporting by CNA
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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