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)