China Airlines Ltd (CAL, 華航) is planning to offer 40 percent more passenger flights this quarter than last quarter, as air travel demand is rising, the company said yesterday as it announced the launch of a Pokemon-themed jet.
The airline is planning to paint one of its Airbus A321neo planes with a livery representing the Japanese animation, video game and mobile game franchise, China Airlines told a news conference in Taipei.
Eleven Pokemon characters would be depicted on the fuselage, including Pikachu, Jigglypuff and Snorlax, while the Poke Ball, which players use to capture the characters in the games, would be depicted on the engines, the airline said.
Photo: CNA
“It is the first time that The Pokemon Co partners with a foreign airline to launch a Pokemon-themed airplane,” the company said, adding that it took about two years for the two sides to prepare for the launch.
As the COVID-19 pandemic affects air travel worldwide, the Japanese firm runs a project called “Flying Pikachu” to encourage people to regain their enthusiasm for travel, and the collaboration with CAL is part of the project, Pokemon executive Susumu Fukunaga said.
The Pokemon-themed airplane would be used for flights to North Asian and Southeast Asian destinations, China Airlines said.
It is not easy to forecast when travel demand will fully recover given the emergence of new variants of SARS-CoV-2, but demand should rise more than 40 percent this quarter, CAL president Kao Shing-hwang (高星潢) said.
The airline would steadily increase the number of passenger flights and is planning to offer more flights to London; Bali, Indonesia; and Sapporo, Japan, this quarter, Kao said.
Asked whether ticket prices would remain at a higher level than before the pandemic, Kao said prices would be determined by supply and demand, and might drop during the slow season.
The number of passenger flights would not increase drastically in the near term, the airline said, adding that it expects its air cargo business to remain stable this quarter.
OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that its Chinese rival DeepSeek (深度求索) is using unfair and increasingly sophisticated methods to extract results from leading US artificial intelligence (AI) models to train the next generation of its breakthrough R1 chatbot, a memo reviewed by Bloomberg News showed. In the memo, sent on Thursday to the US House of Representatives Select Committee on China, OpenAI said that DeepSeek had used so-called distillation techniques as part of “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs.” The company said it had detected “new, obfuscated methods” designed to evade OpenAI’s defenses
NEW IMPORTS: Car dealer PG Union Corp said it would consider introducing US-made models such as the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Stellantis’ RAM 1500 to Taiwan Tesla Taiwan yesterday said that it does not plan to cut its car prices in the wake of Washington and Taipei signing the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade on Thursday to eliminate tariffs on US-made cars. On the other hand, Mercedes-Benz Taiwan said it is planning to lower the price of its five models imported from the US after the zero tariff comes into effect. Tesla in a statement said it has no plan to adjust the prices of the US-made Model 3, Model S and Model X as tariffs are not the only factor the automaker uses to determine pricing policies. Tesla said
China’s top chipmaker has warned that breakaway spending on artificial intelligence (AI) chips is bringing forward years of future demand, raising the risk that some data centers could sit idle. “Companies would love to build 10 years’ worth of data center capacity within one or two years,” Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) cochief executive officer Zhao Haijun (趙海軍) said yesterday on a call with analysts. “As for what exactly these data centers will do, that hasn’t been fully thought through.” Moody’s Ratings projects that AI-related infrastructure investment would exceed US$3 trillion over the next five years, as developers pour eye-watering sums
Australian singer Kylie Minogue says “nothing compares” to performing live, but becoming an international wine magnate in under six years has been quite a thrill for the Spinning Around star. Minogue launched her first own-label wine in 2020 in partnership with celebrity drinks expert Paul Schaafsma, starting with a basic rose but quickly expanding to include sparkling, no-alcohol and premium rose offerings. The actress and singer has since wracked up sales of around 25 million bottles, with her carefully branded products pitched at low-to mid-range prices in dozens of countries. Britain, Australia and the United States are the biggest markets. “Nothing compares to performing
RSS