Private Chinese airlines to fly to Taiwan
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Privately owned Chinese airlines will soon be permitted to fly cross-Strait routes to Taiwan.
According to recent media reports from Taiwan and the mainland, two Shanghai-based airlines, Juneyao Airlines and Spring Airlines, have received the permission from the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) and Civil Aviation Administration Taiwan (CAAT) to launch two cross-Strait routes from Shanghai’s Pudong Airport to Kaohsiung and Pudong to Taipei’s Taoyuan Airport.
In order to launch these new scheduled services, Juneyao and Spring have agreed to swap existing take-off and landing slots at Pudong with Taiwanese airlines.
The Taipei-based financial newspaper Commercial Times reported this week that Shanghai-Kaohsiung service will be operated by both Juneyao and Spring, with each carrier offering three weekly flights on the route. The Pudong-Taoyuan service is reportedly still subject to negotiation, and the carriers are also keen to launch flights between the secondary airports in Shanghai and Taipei – Hongqiao and Songshan.
At present all mainland Chinese carriers operating cross-Strait air routes are state-owned, and include Air China, China Southern Airlines, China Eastern Airlines and their subsidiaries. But the entry of Juneyao, a full-service carrier, along with low-cost Spring, is likely to add more genuine competition on these routes.
At present, airlines on both sides of the Taiwan Strait operate a total of 616 cross-Strait flights per week, connecting 10 airports in Taiwan and 54 in China.
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