Why China Airlines Should Keep Its Name

Been gone for a month, so I'm woefully out of touch with local events.  About the only things I heard about are the big typhoon and the airplane that blew up on the runway in Japan. Didn't see footage in the foreign media of the former, but there sure was plenty of the latter.

(Image from Aug 21st ed of the Taipei Times)

One thing I DID notice was that none of the foreign media bothered to mention that China Airlines is in fact a TAIWANESE airline.  And with some new Chinese product or another being recalled every 3 or 4 days, it suddenly dawned upon me that here was ONE reason for not renaming the company that Taiwan's China Post managed to overlook.  Here goes:

China Airlines should not be renamed "Taiwan Airlines" out of a simple desire to maintain Taiwan's good reputation.  After all, when a China Airlines jet blows up on the tarmac, isn't it better from Taiwan's perspective that foreigners mistakenly take it to be a Chinese, rather than a Taiwanese, company?

Heh.

Comments

[Tim Maddog]

Kinda makes you wonder why they painted over the name on the wreckage, eh?

[The Foreigner]

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No, really? They actually did that?

[Tim Maddog]

They sure did:
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2007/08/23/2003375441
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China Airlines meanwhile had painted over its logo on the charred remains of the burnt-out plane.

CAL official Yoko Kuroda confirmed the carrier had whitened out the corporate logo late on Tuesday with the permission of Japanese authorities.

"Our officials in Taiwan said they recognized that there was a precedent for painting over logos," said Kuroda, from the marketing branch of the airline's Tokyo office.

But Japanese media speculated that the airline was trying to minimize the effect of constant footage from Naha Airport, where investigators from the three countries are sifting through the remains of the plane just outside a boarding gate.
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Investigating this incident a little further, here's a Snopes forum page (with lots of links and info) which seems to indicate that this isn't the first such "whitewash" (and that such things *may* be more common than the media reports indicate):
http://tinyurl.com/285p8e

I found that via comments to this Telstar Logistics post:
http://tinyurl.com/36s2sj

[The Foreigner]

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Guess I shouldn't be surprised. If I were an airline executive, I wouldn't want photos popping up of burned-out wreckage with the company logo on it either.

Still, by that point, most of the damage to the company's reputation had already been done. The foreign press wasn't exactly shy about reporting that this was a China Airlines jet.