CAB tells Taiwanese carriers to just honor pact

Taiwanese carriers China Airlines and Eva Airways can resume flights to the Philippines as long as they stop carrying Manila passengers to a third country as this right is not given to them in the air services agreement between Taipei and Manila.

This was the reply of the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) to a letter request of the Taiwanese government to President Estrada asking him to intervene in the dispute and for the Philippines to honor its air agreements with Taipei.

"We have always maintained that the Taiwanese carriers can resume flights anytime just as long as they respect our ruling," CAB member Franklin Ebdalin said.

The letter request was written by Jeffrey Koo, an emissary of Taiwanese President Lee Teng Hui, following Philippine and Taiwanese civil aviation authorities' failure to forge a new air accord.

The CAB ruling stated that the Taiwanese airlines should not carry Manila passengers to a third country like the United States via Taipei, or the so-called "sixth freedom" traffic, because this is not provided for in the 1996 air agreement.

In aviation parlance, sixth freedom is an airline's right to carry passengers from point A to point B to point C and vice-versa, with point B being the home base of that carrier.

The termination of the air agreement -- which gave the Taiwanese airlines only third and fourth freedom traffic -- by the CAB effective Oct. 1 last year was prompted by sixth freedom violations by CAL and Eva Airways and use of unauthorized aircraft, considered grave abuses of Philippine sovereignty.

Taiwan has insisted that sixth freedom was never mentioned in the 1996 air agreement, so there could be no violation of a non-existent provision.

But Philippine aviation officials said one of the basic principles of statutory construction states, "Inclusio unius est exclusio alterius," which means that what is omitted or excluded is indeed omitted or excluded.

"Following this dictum, there is no question that the right to carry sixth freedom traffic was never conferred to the Philippines nor Taiwan, thus their airlines could not exercise this privilege because it was never granted in the first place," they stressed.

They pointed out that inasmuch as the air accord only allowed the airlines of both territories to exclusively carry Manila-Taipei passengers and vice versa, "carrying traffic beyond these points is a clear violation of the agreement."

Besides abusing the Philippines' sovereign generosity, sixth freedom violations by the Taiwanese carriers have caused serious damage to Philippine Airlines (PAL), putting it on the brink of bankruptcy in the past.

It was also learned that the reason CAL and Eva Airways were able to offer low fares for a round-trip Manila-US via Taipei ticket was because the passengers they picked from the Philippines were "filler traffic."

Since standard airline practice mandates that airplanes leave according to schedule, airlines field their flights whether filled or not. By bringing passengers from Manila to Taipei and transferring them to the next half-filled US-bound flight, these Taiwanese carriers have earned additional revenues.

CAB has earlier said if CAL and Eva Airways were allowed to continuously poach on PAL's US-bound passengers, PAL would soon collapse because the trans-Pacific flights are its bread and butter route.

And if PAL shuts down as it once did in September 1998, this would cause massive unemployment, dislocation of allied industries and the collapse of local economies and other industries depending on its services.