China’s military exercises in the Taiwan Strait forced 36 domestic flights to be canceled, while some international flights could not transit in Taiwan, the Civil Aviation Administration (CAA) said yesterday.
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on Monday announced that it had designated five zones around Taiwan to conduct live-fire exercises, limiting the availability of usable airspace and increasing complexity in coordination among air traffic controllers of flight information regions yesterday, the agency said.
To ensure aviation safety, Air Navigation and Weather Services activated its traffic flow management mechanism for flights entering the Taipei Flight Information Region (FIR) from the FIRs of Fukuoka in Japan and Hong Kong, the CAA said.
Photo: Ritchie B. Tongo, EPA
Flights arriving from the Manila FIR were guided by aviation radar to bypass danger zones, it said.
All flights within the Taipei FIR were asked to take alternative routes for safety reasons, it said.
As of midday yesterday, no international flights had been canceled, although some canceled stopovers in Taiwan, CAA data showed.
Twenty-nine flights operating between Taiwan proper and Kinmen County, and seven flights between Taiwan proper and Lienchiang County (Matsu) had been canceled as of midday yesterday, the data showed.
The CAA on Monday estimated nearly 6,000 people planning to travel between Taiwan proper and Kinmen or Lienchiang would be affected by the PLA exercises, which completely blocked the flights routes to the two outlying counties.
It coordinated with airlines to add 10 extra flights on the Kinmen route after the drills ends, including originally scheduled flights that were delayed, it said.
As a result, 26 delayed flights on the Kinmen route would take off after the exercises conclude, it said.
As the exercises were to end after the last scheduled flight on the Lienchiang route yesterday, the CAA said it has asked airlines to adjust capacity and add extra flights today.
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