China Airlines (CAL, 華航) said yesterday it is probing the opening of a cabin door on a Boeing 747-400 flight from Taipei to Los Angeles earlier this month.
"We are investigating this incident, and we apologize to the passengers on that flight," Chen Peng-yu (陳鵬宇), head of CAL's press office, told reporters.
"When the plane took off from the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, the crew made sure all the cabin doors were fastened, so we do not know why it opened in mid-air. We have asked the Boeing Company to explain it," he said.
There were no reports of injuries and the incident did not cause any damage to the Boeing jet, he said.
The Chinese-language Apple Daily reported the incident after being informed by one of the passengers on the Dec. 8 flight. CAL, the nation's largest airline, confirmed the report yesterday morning.
According to the passenger, surnamed Tan, he noticed something was wrong approximately five minutes after flight CI008 had left Taipei for Los Angeles at 11:52pm.
Tan, who was sitting in the business class cabin, said he heard commotion and crying in the economy cabin, and learned that a cabin door in the back of the jet had opened.
The door was on the left side of the Boeing jet, near rows 46 and 47. A passenger seated near the door could hear it rattling, indicating the door was not completely closed.
As wind blew into the cabin, some passengers began to cry as crew members tried to close the cabin door more tightly.
When they were unable to close the door of the jet -- which was flying at an altitude of about 300m -- the pilot decided to dump the plane's fuel into the sea and return to the Taoyuan airport.
After ground checks and a delay of four hours, the plane with 264 passengers aboard took off again for Los Angeles, the Apple Daily said.
CAL wants Boeing to probe why the door opened in mid-air, and if the cabin door was not fastened when the plane took off, why the warning light had not gone off.
Aviation expert Lee Shih-ping said that the sudden opening of a cabin door was extremely dangerous for passengers and could damage the aircraft.
"If the cabin suddenly loses pressure, passengers can suffer from hypothermia or pass out from loss of oxygen. The cabin door or even passengers could be sucked out of the plane," he said.
The Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) said yesterday that the incident was not an aviation accident, nor will the airline be penalized because of it.
Lee Wan-lee (
Lee said that they found the instrument panel had shown nothing out of the ordinary about the cabin doors when the airplane was preparing for take off.
It is likely that the door was not completely closed and the sensors did not detect anything abnormal, he said.
Additional reporting by Shelley Shan
Shares of contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) came under pressure yesterday after a report that Apple Inc is looking to shift some orders from the Taiwanese company to Intel Corp. TSMC shares fell NT$55, or 2.4 percent, to close at NT$2,235 on the local main board, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed. Despite the losses, TSMC is expected to continue to benefit from sound fundamentals, as it maintains a lead over its peers in high-end process development, analysts said. “The selling was a knee-jerk reaction to an Intel-Apple report over the weekend,” Mega International Investment Services Corp (兆豐國際投顧) analyst Alex Huang
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is expected to remain Apple Inc’s primary chip manufacturing partner despite reports that Apple could shift some orders to Intel Corp, industry experts said yesterday. The comments came after The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Apple and Intel had reached a preliminary agreement following more than a year of negotiations for Intel to manufacture some chips for Apple devices. Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (台灣經濟研究院) economist Arisa Liu (劉佩真) said TSMC’s advanced packaging technologies, including integrated fan-out and chip-on-wafer-on-substrate, remain critical to the performance of Apple’s A-series and M-series chips. She said Intel and Samsung
POWER BUILDUP: Powered by Nvidia’s B200 Blackwell chips, the data center would support MediaTek’s computing power demand and business growth, the company said Smartphone chip designer MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday launched a new artificial intelligence (AI) data center with a maximum capacity of 45 megawatts to meet its rising demand for computing power required to develop new advanced chips for AI applications. The company has completed the first-phase computing power buildup at the data center in Miaoli County’s Tongluo Township (銅鑼), providing 15 megawatts of capacity to support its research and development (R&D) capabilities, despite an industrywide shortage of key components, MediaTek said. Supply constraints have plagued a wide range of key components, including memory chips, solid-state drives, power supply units and central
TRANSITION: With the closure, the company would reorganize its Taiwanese unit to a sales and service-focused model, Bridgestone said Bridgestone Corp yesterday announced it would cease manufacturing operations at its tire plant in Hsinchu County’s Hukou Township (湖口), affecting more than 500 workers. Bridgestone Taiwan Co (台灣普利司通) said in a statement that the decision was based on the Tokyo-based tire maker’s adjustments to its global operational strategy and long-term market development considerations. The Taiwanese unit would be reorganized as part of the closure, effective yesterday, and all related production activities would be concluded, the statement said. Under the plan, Bridgestone would continue to deepen its presence in the Taiwanese market, while transitioning to a sales and service-focused business model, it added. The Hsinchu
RSS