The government is to require certain uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) to be equipped with a radio frequency identification (RFID) equipment following an amendment to the Civil Aviation Act (民用航空法) yesterday.
The purpose of registering the drones is to know who their owners are, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Chung Chia-pin (鍾佳濱) said, adding that owners would be punished if they contravene the act.
Simply having the registration number on the body of the drones is not enough, Chung said, adding that the government would be thinking like “stone-age people” if it only required the registration number be placed on the memory cards of the drones.
The government should be able to identify people controlling drones remotely using wireless electronic devices, he said.
The legislature’s Transportation Committee ruled that drone owners can only operate their devices after they acquire licenses from the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA).
Drones that can be remotely controlled must have RFID functionality if they are in a certain weight category, it said.
The rule is stipulated by the CAA to regulate the use of drones more effectively, the committee said, adding that it could also seek assistance from police to crackdown UAVs operated illegally.
Drone owners would be punished based on the way that they operate the drones, CAA Director-General Lin Kuo-hsien (林國顯) said, adding that failure to register their drones would be one of the offenses that call for a penalty.
The CAA would establish a registration platform so that people can use their health insurance cards, national ID cards or national ID certificates to register their drones the way people register their cars or motorcycles, Lin said.
The amendment also requires the Ministry of Transportation and Communications to stipulate the rules of enforcement governing the registration, certifications, maintenance and operation of drones, as well as qualifications of drone operators and responsibilities of drone manufacturers.
In related news, whether former CAA employees would violate the revolving-door policy for government workers should they choose to work in soon-to-be-established StarLux Airlines would depend on the interpretation from the government personnel authority, the CAA said.
The airline, founded by former EVA Air chairman Chang Kuo-wei (張國煒), is reported to have offered a retired CAA aircraft inspector a management position.
“We have heard the report, but most of our inspectors are contractors and whether the Civil Servant Work Act (公務員服務法) applies to them is in question,” CAA Flight Standards Division Director Clark Lin (林俊良) said.
“We cannot make that judgement. We will seek interpretation from government personnel agencies on this matter after we have received the application from StarLux, which has yet to be established,” Lin said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
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,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift