The Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) said yesterday that 176 extra cross-strait flights would be added to airline schedules to help Taiwanese return from Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and Guangzhou during the Lunar New Year holidays.
CAA Director-General Lee Lung-wen (李龍文) said Taiwan and China agreed to cap the flights to and from these four cities because the airspaces and time slots of the airports in those cities are expected to be packed during this time, as Chinese domestic flight schedules will also be very full.
The CAA said a total of 672 flights would be operating among these four cities during the holidays, including regular cross-strait flights that are already available.
Only flights to and from these four cities were capped.
Flights to and from other Chinese airports, such as Hangzhou, will not be capped.
The agency plans to finish distributing 88 flights among five Taiwanese airlines next week, Lee said, and travelers will be able to start reserving tickets by the latter half of next month.
The additional flights will operate from Jan. 31 to Feb. 28.
The Taiwanese airlines will share 88 additional flights during this time — each week, eight additional flights can be dispatched to Shanghai, four to Shenzhen, five to Beijing and five to Guangzhou. Chinese airlines will also have 88 flights to divide among themselves.
Lee said the distribution of the additional flights would follow several guidelines, including the number of cross-strait regular flights an airline has and its capacity to maximize the efficiency of the cross-strait flight service.
He said the CAA might also consider the ticket prices the airline set when distributing the flights.
Cross-strait flight prices have made the CAA the target of criticism at the legislature and among consumer rights groups.
They say shorter cross-strait flight routes have not translated into cheaper tickets. The nominal price for a Taipei-to-Shanghai ticket is NT$24,000.
“Getting this deal is not easy, and the benefits of the cross-strait flight service should be enjoyed by everyone, not by airlines,” Lee said.
“Airlines should try to offer various special deals to the customers, if they have a conscience,” he said.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS