Chang Kuo-wei Still Flies the Airline He Built

Chang Kuo-wei was already in the air when the family took the airline away from him.

On 11 March 2016 he was flying a scheduled EVA Air 777 to Singapore. Back in Taipei, an unscheduled board meeting replaced him as chairman. Reuters had the statement the same day. The Taipei Times printed the share math: his older half-brothers held the larger block. By the time he landed, the job was gone.

He was forty-five, and he had chaired EVA for three years. He was the youngest son of Chang Yung-fa, who had built Evergreen Group from a shipping line into one of Taiwan’s defining conglomerates, and the only child of the founder’s second wife. In a Chinese family firm, that last fact decides more than talent does.

A sealed will had named him successor to the group and primary heir to his father’s personal estate. The votes inside the companies belonged to the first house. He did not get Evergreen back.

Chang was born in 1970. He took a master’s in economics at California State University, then came home and joined EVA in 1996 on the maintenance floor. The founder’s son started as a mechanic. He later flew the line as a captain, and he still holds a professional maintenance licence and type ratings on the Boeing 777 and the Airbus jets he now buys for himself.

People who worked around him at EVA remember a chairman who would appear, unannounced, in the captain’s seat on a 777 to Singapore or Los Angeles. It looked like a stunt until you saw it was a theory of management. He did not trust an airline he could not fly.

After the ouster he told a Taiwanese paper he would take a break from aviation. He lasted about as long as a man like that lasts on the ground. In 2018 he registered STARLUX Airlines. On 23 January 2020 he sat on the maiden flight to Macau. CNN, writing before launch, called it Taiwan’s first new major international airline in roughly three decades. The island’s skies had been a two-carrier argument—China Airlines and EVA—for a generation. He made it three.

The timing was almost comic. A boutique full-service startup opened into a pandemic. He kept aircraft flying, leaned on cargo and the regional recovery, and kept signing for Airbus jets as if the calendar would eventually come back to him. It did.

Local papers had already decided who he was. They called him Hamlet. Before the first ticket sold, K.W. Nieh, then STARLUX’s chief communications officer, told CNN Travel that Chang rejected the part. He wanted an airline that matched his idea of the job after leaving Evergreen’s constraints. The revenge story was other people’s entertainment. The company was his answer to a house that would not have him.

The product has his taste. Cabins designed with BMW’s Designworks studio. An all-Airbus fleet. A small First cabin on the long-haul jets. A public promise, made before launch, that STARLUX would not start a fare war. Taiwan’s aviation market had spent years competing on price, strikes, and alliance muscle. He bet that a third carrier could compete on how the cabin felt.

That bet redrew the market. Taipei was no longer a two-carrier choice. For Taiwanese passengers who had grown up treating EVA as the family airline—and for those who had never quite loved China Airlines—there was suddenly a third name that belonged to neither camp. He did not get the house. He built a listed company beside it.

In October 2024 the airline listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange as ticker 2646. Forbes, writing after the first-day jump, said the offer raised nearly $300 million, and that Chang and his two sons, Sheng-Hung and Sheng-Wei, held about 64 percent. On that day’s price the magazine called him a billionaire on the holding alone. The family stake, in any case, is his family now.

Two months earlier, Taiwan’s Supreme Court had upheld the old will after a case brought by his half-brother Chang Kuo-cheng. The personal estate was then reported at about NT$14 billion. Taiwanese civil law still leaves other heirs a reserved share, and the ruling did not return Evergreen. He won the father’s paper. He never won the father’s company. STARLUX is the company he could actually keep.

He still flies it. In January he went to Toulouse and brought home the airline’s first A350-1000, the first of that stretched type in Taiwan. On the first of August he sat in the captain’s seat again and opened Europe, Taipei to Prague. Glenn Chai, STARLUX’s chief executive, talks about semiconductor traffic and leisure demand. Chang still prefers the airplane.

The route map has the same handwriting. Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle were the expected Pacific doors. Then Ontario, then Phoenix. Prague before Paris. At the May shareholder meeting he said the company had applied for Zurich and Barcelona, and that some leading oneworld carriers wanted STARLUX to work with members first. China Airlines is in SkyTeam. EVA is in Star Alliance. The third house is still outside. He has always been better at building a thing he can touch than at joining a club that can vote him out.

Last year the company said it carried 4.9 million passengers. The airline is listed, staffed, and large enough that a chairman can stay in the office. He still takes the new jets home himself.

The family that removed him still has EVA. He has the carrier that did not exist until he needed somewhere to go.