Starlux Airlines Co (星宇航空) is considering delaying plans to fly from Taiwan to North America and Guam until the end of next year due to uncertainty over border restrictions, the company said yesterday.
“We are thinking of pushing back our plan to expand routes to North America to the end of next year,” Starlux spokesman Nieh Kuo-wei (聶國維) told the Taipei Times by telephone.
It had earlier proposed starting the flights in the middle of next year.
Photo courtesy of StarLux Airlines Co
“The outlook remains clouded,” Nieh said. “Although some have predicted that border controls would be eased with the US administering COVID-19 jabs, the situation is still uncertain.”
The International Air Transport Association has launched a travel pass system for governments and airlines that requires travelers to either provide a negative COVID-19 test or proof of vaccination, but it remains to be seen whether the system would be accepted in Taiwan, he said.
Starlux has applied to the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) to operate 15 new routes from Taiwan to destinations including Boston, Chicago, Guam, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington.
If it defers launching the flights to the end of next year, it would not need to reapply to the CAA, Nieh said.
However, it still needs approval from US regulators before launching the routes, he said.
Starlux would evaluate which destinations are most suitable to operate first, based on passenger demand and air cargo business potential, he said.
The airline might pick three or four destinations to begin flights next year, and another five to six destinations in 2023, Nieh said.
The airline in 2019 inked a deal with Airbus SE to purchase 17 A350s, and would start to take delivery of five A350-900s this year and 12 A350-1000s next year, he said.
Delivery of the first jets has been rescheduled to next year, as the pandemic has disrupted Airbus’ global supply chain, Nieh said.
Starlux has not finalized how many A350 jets it would receive next year, he said.
Starlux, which began operations in January last year, had a 2.13 percent market share in terms of passenger numbers and a 0.08 percent market share in terms of cargo volume in December last year, CAA statistics showed.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained