Interesting interview for his new airline: https://www.starlux-airlines.com/

It is in Chinese but he does have huge ambitions...

K Chang is the son of the founder of Evergreen Group and EVA Air. He can do everything from fixing planes to flying the 777s. He got forced out by EVA due to family feud after YF Chang passed.

As the airline (IATA Code JX) prepares for its inauguration flight in January (1/23/2020), details on routes, uniforms and cabin are starting to get announced.

has the uniform announcement (starts about 16:00) and a Q&A session at the end

https://onemileatatime.com/starlux-airlines/ has some more information.

Interesting facts:

1 - lie flat seats in the A321neo front cabin
2 - free wifi for all passengers

I wonder how many people would pay double economy price (or more) to have lie flat seats for flights under 4 hours.

*raises hands* I generally do between NZ and Australia.

There are only two J rows or 8 seats.
I am one of those that would pay double Y to get a lie-flat for 3h+ flights. My back likes it a lot.

I doubt there will be many flights where you can lay down for 3 hours or more. They are not operating any flights to China so the only possible destinations to have 3h+ in those 321 will be somewhere in Hokkaido, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. For their current destinations, Penang is the only flight you will be able to lie flat for 3 hours or more. As a customer I welcome this change but I probably won't pay double the price to enjoy the seats.

In any case there are only 8 seats, I don't think there will be a problem to fill them.

To be fair, many pax (myself included) regularly pay "double economy price (or more)" just to get domestic F seats that aren't even lie flat for sub-4hr flights within the US.

Several airlines offer or have offered lie-flat seats on short-haul routes from Taipei, EVA being one of them.

The main question is whether you offer business class or not. If a new startup airline does, It has to offer a superior product.

CX/KA is an interesting case. FT posters tend to hate the regional business class seats where CX/KA charges a huge premium for mediocre seats. As CX is using some of its longhaul ac during the day on regional routes, you can see how pax go out of their way to book lie-flat seats and get very upset in case of a last-minute sub to regional seats.
But CX/KA have a different business model from Starlux. CX premium class demand on regional route is increased by premium class pax transiting from Europe, Australia and NA. And they offer high frequencies to major Asian cities.

Personally, I am unconvinced by these luxury small airlines facing huge competition from legacy airlines and LCCs. I am not aware of any that succeeded. Starlux will have to be both cheap and luxurious. That's impossible. To get back to the 82" business seat, a pair takes more space than two rows of 6 Y seats (pitch of 31"). Hence 8 J seats replace some 24+ Y seats. That makes it impossible to compete with LCCs. And the lack of transit feeder traffic makes it very hard to compete with legacy airlines. I assume that Starlux is trying to negotiate some codesharing with US airlines, but that is not easy.

But you have to look at the load of the budget airlines. I haven't flown all the routes, but they almost never have a full flight (unlike a domestic flight in the US, for example). So it may not be "giving up" as much as you think

I am also skeptical about Starlux for reasons you describe. United might make sense as a partner given the existing SFO-TPE service, but Starlux would have to offer options that NH doesn't serve. It is very difficult (impossible?) to connect onward using EVA on a UA ticket.

I thought Starlux's longer term plan is to acquire A350s and start long-thin routes to NA?

The crazy thing is when EVA first started, they were aiming for the up market also. The lower 2/3 of the first 744s were Economy Deluxe class. They quickly realized that did not work and retrofitted the cabins.

I thought they already orders A350s for delivery end of 2021 and will start LAX service some time in 2022.

If you use Chinese pin-yin XING YU brings up something else on Windows

JX released another video about the A321neo cabin. J seems nice but Y seems crammed as expected. First aircraft will arrive TPE on 10/28 and there is a photo contest.

Firm order for 5 A359 and 12 A35K.

Wow, I believe CI+BR already run 6x daily on LA-TPE (5x LAX, 1x ONT) all on 777/A350s...?
ICN and HKG only have 4x each.

LAX is the number one priority for JX and Taiwanese carriers because of the huge Asian/Taiwanese population. Who would have thought 30 years ago it would be like this.

I am sure his hope is to take some passengers from CI & BR as his network is a lot smaller and he, at least right now, is not in any alliance.

How would a smaller network and not being in an alliance help take passengers away? And with that much capacity wouldn't BR/CI just cut prices to squeeze JX? I simply don't see anyway this can work... trying to compete with BR/CI head-on. Why not pick an unserved market with no TPE competition (DFW, IAD, BOS, SAN, PDX, ATL, LAS -- basically go after KE's network) or something like SJC that might attract people from the South Bay?