Direct flights between Taipei International Airport and Shanghai’s Hongqiao Airport will be officially launched before June 14, the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) said over the weekend.
Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) is scheduled to leave for Shanghai’s World Expo for an event hosted at the Taiwan Pavilion on that date.
Officials from the CAA and the Chinese Aviation Administration held talks in Taipei on Friday and Saturday.
Both sides also agreed to increase the total number of weekly passengers flights from 270 to 370 and to raise the number of weekly cargo flights from 28 to 48. Starting next month, each side will dispatch 185 passenger flights and 24 cargo flights per week.
Specifically, each side can offer 14 flights between Taipei International and Hongqiao. Meanwhile, both sides agreed to four more weekly flights to Beijing and Shenzhen. The other 20 flights added must be to either Xiamen or Fuzhou.
Apart from regular flights, both sides agreed to launch charter flights from Taichung, Hualien, Taitung and Makong (馬公), capping the total at 20 charter flights per month.
In addition to the Hongqiao flights, passenger flights will also be available to Shijiazhuang in Hebei Province from next month. Cargo flights will be available to Nanjing, Xiamen, Fuzhou and Chongqing as well. Carriers in Taiwan and China can also launch code sharing flights.
CAA Director-General Lee Long-wen (李龍文) said that he was dissatisfied with the results of the talks and that he had accepted the outcome only reluctantly, adding that a joint evaluation of the performance of cross-strait flights is scheduled for August, with further negotiations in October.
The results also fell short of the expectations of the nation’s carriers, who said before the talks that the number of passenger flights could be doubled to 540 flights a week.
While Lee said the increase in both passenger and cargo flights would help ease demand, some carriers said that it would not help lower ticket prices.
The only gain in the negotiations on this occasion was the cargo flights, Lee said, adding that initially China only agreed to include Nanjing, but was later persuaded to add Fuzhou, Xiamen and Chonging to the list.
There will be two weekly cargo flights to each of the new airports. Meanwhile, the number of cargo flights to Shanghai and Guangzhou have been increased from seven to eight per week.
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