Taiwan's top air safety administrator yesterday described a China Airlines flight -- which lost its senior pilot due to a heart attack and was landed by the young co-pilot -- as a "serious incident."
He said post-landing procedures for the flight on Monday would be closely scrutinized to see if regulations were followed.
The subsequent cause of the pilot's death will not be known until an autopsy and an investigation into as-yet unspecified medication found in the pilot's aviation bag is carried out, the head of the Cabinet-level Aviation Safety Council (ASC) said yesterday.
Captain Gueorguiev, a Bulgarian veteran pilot, suffered a heart attack and fell into a coma just after taking off on a CAL flight to Vietnam.
The incident, on Monday morning, forced co-pilot Lin Hsin (林欣), 27, to abort the flight and make an immediate return to Taipei.
Although none of the 259 passengers and 14 crew members on board were injured, the 45-year old Gueorguiev was rushed unconscious to a local hospital and pronounced dead at 10:25am.
Lin said yesterday that any co-pilot would have been capable of taking control of the plane and making a quick return to Taipei -- without triggering any aviation safety mishaps.
"What I worried about at the time was my partner, whose condition looked quite serious," Lin said.
The mishap, according to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), was graded as "a serious incident," said Kay Yong, (
"The incapacitation of a crew member is a serious incident according to ICAO definitions," Yong said.
Although ASC investigators and prosecutors from Taoyuan public prosecutors' office continued interviewing crew members yesterday to understand the case, the cause of Gueorguiev's death will remain inconclusive until an autopsy is carried out, said Yong.
"Although his relatives have given verbal consent to the proposed autopsy over the phone, the work won't start until written consent from his relatives comes through," Yong said.
CAL spokesman Scott Shih (石炳煌) said CAL were arranging for Gueorguiev's relatives to come to Taipei "as soon as possible."
The ASC will also work with the Department of Health to find out what the unknown drugs found in the veteran pilot's aviation bag were, Yong said.
Another focus for the ASC investigation is on what Yong called the "less-than-satisfactory coordination" carried out after the plane landed back in Taipei on Monday morning.
"We consider it necessary to further investigate the overall coordination after the plane landed," he added.
When asked to detail what he considered the pitfalls in the related coordination work, Yong said he would brief reporters on this aspect at a press conference scheduled to be held today.
In related news, the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) decided yesterday to suspend the operation of Daily Air, including its regular and chartered flights, for two months, due to a series of mishaps since 1998.
Following the airline's plane crashes in 1998 and 1999 that killed six people, a Daily Air helicopter was snagged by a wire stretching across the valley in Taichung County on Monday, injuring a total of eight people. Daily Air was also required to complete a plan in six months to improve the airline's financial situation as well as its aviation safety record, said CAA officials.
Meanwhile, ASC officials reached the scene of the Daily Air accident yesterday in an attempt to verify claims by the pilot that he failed to see the cable wire because of blinding sunlight.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has