Some 500 travelers have been left stranded abroad after the apparent collapse of Taiwanese airline Far Eastern Air Transport. However, on Friday, the airline’s boss appeared in public to announce that reports of the airline’s closure were the result of a misunderstanding. He said the airline has new investors and could return to the skies within hours.
What happened at Far Eastern Air Transport? An airline that had just begun Christmas travel promotions suddenly announced Thursday that it would stop operations the next day due to financial woes. 500 passengers found themselves stranded abroad, and other airlines scheduled last-minute extra flights to help stranded domestic travelers.
There was talk of more than 1000 airline staff losing their jobs overnight.
Officials said the company had broken the law for not giving adequate notice before shutting down. They threatened fines. And they threatened legal consequences for airline boss Chang Kang-wei.
But, the company’s vice president said, Chang Kang-wei had been missing for two weeks, and was nowhere to be found. The vice president said that Chang had left only a letter saying he’d been scammed out of money and asking for an investigation.
Then, on Friday, the supposedly missing Chang Kang-wei appeared in public, accompanied by lawyers. He says the whole affair has been a misunderstanding: that he had been at work all through the past two weeks, that he’d been in a bad mood on the day the airline announced it would stop flights and had simply turned his phone off, and that his subordinates had made a mistake.
He said the airline will keep its entire staff, and that it will return to the skies. He said three groups of investors have contacted him, and that flights could resume as soon as Friday afternoon.