Daily Air

Is Daily Air safe?

Yes for the trip itself: no one has died on a Daily Air flight in 20 years. But its record is weaker than those of UNI Air and Mandarin Airlines. Daily Air flies 19-seat Twin Otters to Taiwan's smallest islands, and from 2014 to 2017 it damaged three aircraft in three years. Each time, the Taiwan Transportation Safety Board (TTSB) found gaps in training and in how crews followed procedures. We score it 74, below UNI Air (80), which flies the larger island airports.

What has gone wrong at Daily Air?

Three accidents in a short period, on a fleet of three or four aircraft:

• Taitung, December 2014. On a training flight in a Dornier 228, the instructor and the trainee captain skipped the before-landing checklist and landed with the wheels up. The aircraft slid more than 200 metres on its belly and was written offHull lossAn accident in which an aircraft is destroyed or damaged beyond economic repair. People may or may not be hurt.More in the glossary. No one was hurt. The TTSB said the instructor talked so much that the cockpit lost track of the gear, did not take over when the gear warning sounded, and had not been properly trained himself. It also found staff shortages in the training department and staff worried about their jobs.
• Lanyu, February 2015. A Dornier with 19 passengers landed in a crosswind with its right main gear off the runway edge. The crew went around, found the damaged gear would not retract, and flew back to Taitung, where everyone got off safely. It was the captain's first Lanyu flight without an instructor, and his route training had not met the company's own manual.
• Lanyu, April 2017. A Twin Otter on flight DA7511 drifted left after landing in a crosswind with wind shear. Trying to correct it, the captain pulled the wrong power lever into reverse, and the aircraft ran off the runway into the airport fence. None of the 19 people on board was hurt, but the aircraft was badly damaged. The TTSB found that Daily Air had not taught its pilots how to use differential reverse thrust on the new type, and that its safety management system was not working as it should.

The next year brought another runway excursionRunway excursionWhen an aircraft leaves the runway surface during take-off or landing, either off the end (an overrun) or off the side (a veer-off).More in the glossary, this time an incident rather than an accident. In April 2018, flight DA7012 from Qimei veered off the runway at Kaohsiung after the captain turned the nosewheel the wrong way. The TTSB noted that no full-motion Twin Otter 400 simulator existed then, so pilots trained only in the aircraft. It also noted that the captain was on his eighth flight of the day after more than ten hours on duty, and that a day of 12 flights on the eastern routes could carry a high fatigue risk.

Since 2018 the record is quieter but not empty. On one day in May 2019 a Twin Otter had a brake hydraulic fault at Lanyu, where passengers walked along the runway to the terminal, and after repair an engine that would not run before a later departure. In December 2023 one of Daily Air's BK117 helicopters dropped its sling load in the mountains of Nantou on a supply flight. Nobody was hurt, but the TTSB found that not following the sling-load procedure was common across the BK117 crews.

What planes does Daily Air fly?

Since October 2016, the DHC-6-400 Twin Otter. Daily Air leased four from CAVU Aviation Finance to replace three Dornier 228s that the regulator said were more than 20 years old. Three were new from the factory and one came second-hand from Regent Airways in Bangladesh. The Series 400 is the current version of the type, with a modern cockpit and engines, and it is built for short strips. It is still a basic aircraft: unpressurised, hand-flown, and sensitive to gusts on landing.

The change of type explains part of the 2017–2018 record. Both TTSB reports describe pilots still learning the new aircraft, without a simulator and without company guidance on some handling points. The Twin Otter fleet got one company policy on using uneven reverse thrust only after the 2018 excursion; until then, its instructors and check pilots disagreed.

Who checks Daily Air?

Taiwan's Civil Aviation Administration, which holds FAA IASAFAA IASAThe US FAA's check of whether a country's aviation regulator meets ICAO standards. Category 1 means it does; Category 2 means it does not.More in the glossary Category 1. Daily Air is not an IATA member, so it has no confirmed IOSAIOSAThe IATA Operational Safety Audit, an international audit of an airline's safety management and operations. Every IATA member must pass it.More in the glossary audit; we score Taiwanese airlines without IOSA 80 for oversight and take four points off here. The TTSB reports of 2014 and 2015 said the CAA had not properly reviewed Daily Air's manuals and, with its inspectors overloaded, had not checked the airline on site. The 2023 helicopter report said random CAA checks had trouble catching crews who strayed from procedures.

The airline's owners have had legal trouble too. In February 2022, Taipei prosecutors indicted two former chairmen, accusing them of inflating maintenance and other costs to claim about NT$916 million in subsidies for the island routes and of taking money out of the company. We found no verdict yet. The case concerns invoices, not flight safety, so it is not in the score, but the Control Yuan also criticised how the CAA checked Daily Air's subsidy claims.

How to fly Daily Air safely

Book an early flight to Lanyu and Lüdao. The 2018 report shows that late flights come at the end of long duty days, and an early flight leaves more of the day to rebook if wind closes the runway. Keep a spare day before anything you cannot miss: typhoons and crosswinds close these runways, and in September 2025 Typhoon Ragasa cancelled every Daily Air flight from Taitung for a day. If the airline cancels for wind, take the ferry rather than pressing for the next flight: two of the three accidents above began with a crosswind landing.

How we scored it

The accident record (80) has no fatal accident in 15 years, but three damage accidents in 2014–2017, all with training findings, keep it at the bottom of that band. Serious incidents (62) and the operating environment (60) are the weakest factors. Oversight (76) is below other Taiwanese airlines because Daily Air has no confirmed IOSAIOSAThe IATA Operational Safety Audit, an international audit of an airline's safety management and operations. Every IATA member must pass it.More in the glossary and the TTSB faulted the CAA's checks. The fleet (74) is one current type, mostly about ten years old. Overall 74. Compare Mandarin Airlines, which also flies to the islands.