UNI Airways (立榮航空) of the Evergreen Group is the sole recipient of the Golden Sky Award this year for its performance during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Civil Aeronautics Administration announced yesterday.
The airline has won the Golden Sky Award nine times since the agency began evaluating the performance of airlines in 1998.
The civil aviation authority chose the recipient of the award after evaluating the performance of three domestic flight carriers from July 2020 to June last year: UNI Airways, Mandarin Airlines (華信航空) and Daily Air Corp (德安航空).
Photo: CNA
The administration suspended the evaluation for international and cross-strait flight carriers as the COVID-19 pandemic caused passenger volumes to drop to 2.38 percent of the pre-pandemic level.
UNI Airways was ranked first in several categories, including timeliness, flight schedule execution and usage of electronic boarding passes or self-check in machines, the administration said.
UNI Airways chairman Solomon Lin (林志忠) said that the airline operates flights to Asian countries, Taiwan’s outlying islands as well as Hualien and Taitung counties.
Photo: Chen Hsin-yu, Taipei Times
“We have continued to service air travelers despite the pandemic over the past two years. As the pandemic has begun to ease in the country, we are working with local government officials to reboot tourism across the nation by increasing flights or using larger aircraft to carry passengers,” he said.
Administration Director-General Lin Kuo-hsien (林國顯) said that domestic flight carriers have been facing a series of political, economic and public health challenges in the past few decades, from the SARS outbreak in 2003, the global financial crisis in 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
However, none of these challenges has slowed their progress, he said.
“What does not kill us makes us stronger,” Lin Kuo-hsien said, adding that “the airline industry experienced suffering, but it did not waste that suffering. Not only have they survived through government subsidies, they have prepared themselves for the economic recovery and developed stronger resilience.”
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