Starlux Airlines, the newest international carrier in Taiwan, yesterday announced that it would launch direct flights from Taoyuan to Kumamoto, Japan, in September, the airline’s seventh Japanese destination.
It would provide three round-trip flights to Kumamoto a week initially, starting on Sept. 1, with bookings opening yesterday, Starlux Airlines said.
The airline in April launched direct flights to Sendai, Japan.
Photo courtesy of Starlux Airlines
It would use Airbus A321neo aircraft, which have 188 seats, on the Kumamoto route, it said.
In addition to Sendai, Starlux flies to Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka, Sapporo and Okinawa in Japan.
A delegation of politicians and Diet members from Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party in Kumamoto Prefecture, led by Tetsushi Sakamoto, the party’s deputy secretary-general, early last month called for the resumption of direct flights between the prefecture and Taiwan.
Flights between Kumamoto and Kaohsiung started in October 2015, but were suspended in February 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Civil Aeronautics Administration said.
Kumamoto is a draw for tourists and also has a well-founded semiconductor industry, so the route would provide a convenient option for business travelers from Taiwan and Japan, the airline said.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, is building a wafer plant in Kumamoto through a joint venture, with mass production scheduled to start by the end of next year.
In addition to Japan, Starlux flies to 10 other Asian destinations in Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Macau.
On April 26, the carrier launched direct flights to Los Angeles, its first destination outside Asia.
Starlux is planning to fly to San Francisco at the end of this year and to Seattle by the middle of next year, while the company is expected to launch direct flights to New York in 2025 at the earliest.
The airline industry has received a boost from eased border controls after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Starlux posted NT$1.68 billion (US$54.8 million) in consolidated sales in April, up from NT$92.76 million in the same month last year.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comment last year on Tokyo’s potential reaction to a Taiwan-China conflict has forced Beijing to rewrite its invasion plans, a retired Japanese general said. Takaichi told the Diet on Nov. 7 last year that a Chinese naval blockade or military attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, potentially allowing Tokyo to exercise its right to collective self-defense. Former Japan Ground Self-Defense Force general Kiyofumi Ogawa said in a recent speech that the remark has been interpreted as meaning Japan could intervene in the early stages of a Taiwan Strait conflict, undermining China’s previous assumptions
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
RSS