A senior civil aviation official called for the establishment of
regular charter flights across the Taiwan Straits. The
Spring Festival charter-flight program, which ended yesterday,
saw six Taiwan and six mainland airlines operating 72 non-stop
round-trip direct flights from the mainland to
Taiwan during the holiday.
Packed to capacity with 260 Taiwan passengers, Shanghai
Airlines flight FM808 flew in from Taipei to Pudong
International Airport at around 2:30 PM.
Xiamen
Airlines flight MF884 touched down at Gaoqi airport in Xiamen,
a port city in east China's Fujian
Province, at 3:25 PM from Kaohsiung.
They were the last two round-trip cross-Straits charter flights
for the Spring Festival.
About 27,000 passengers took the flights this year, which
started on January 20, compared with 10,000 in 48 flights last
year.
Pu Zhaozhou, director of the Office of Taiwan, Hong Kong and
Macao Affairs under the General Administration of Civil Aviation of
China, yesterday hailed the success of the scheme. "We will focus
on cross-Straits charter flights for major festivals and weekends
or even making them regular all year long," he told China
Daily.
Pu, the mainland's top negotiator for cross-Straits charter
flights, suggested Beijing push for early talks on the issue this
year.
This was the third time that charter flights were put into
operation during the Lunar New Year holidays.
Due to Taipei's decades-old ban on direct trade, transport and
postal services links across the Straits, travelers have to stop
over usually in Hong
Kong or Macao.
This year, however, the flights were run between Beijing,
Shanghai, Guangzhou and Xiamen on the mainland, and Taipei and
Kaohsiung in Taiwan through Hong Kong airspace.
The 12 Taiwan and mainland airlines in this year's charter
program offered a total of 32,076 seats and reported an average
passenger occupancy rate of more than 80 percent.
An estimated 1 million Taiwan people work or live on the
mainland. Last year, Taiwan people paid more than 4.1 million
visits to the mainland.
(China Daily February 8, 2006)