The army yesterday acknowledged that a glitch in the timing of of live-fire shooting during the last round of the Hankuang No. 19 exercise in mid-May in Ilan had endangered helicopters by letting them approach an area of dangerous ground fire.
A fatal accident could have happened if the attack helicopters had not turned around in time.
The helicopters were about to fire missiles and rockets toward surface targets in coordination with artillery weapons firing from the shore. Due to a delay in the process, the helicopters and artillery troops did not fire at their designated times. The result was that as artillery troops were firing toward sea targets, the helicopters nearly flew through across the path of the artillery shells.
The army refused to identify the cause of the delay. It emphasized the same mistake will not happen again.
"The delay was only for a short time. We used time to control the firing of weapons from the air and ground. But it was apparent that the time control developed some problems," a spokesman for the army said.
"We launched meetings to discuss the accident after the exercise. We have found out some solutions. The same mistake will not happen during the second round of Hankuang No. 19 exercises to be held on Sept. 1," the spokesman said.
The army spokesman was responding to reports by the Liberty Times and Central News Agency on the incident. He confirmed the reports, which seemed to have quoted from the same anonymous sources.
The incident happened in mid-May as the first round of Hankuang No. 19 exercise took place in Ilan. It was the first time that the annual Hankuang-series exercises were held twice in a year. The second round of Hankuang No. 19 is scheduled for Sept. 1, also in Ilan.
At the time, a number of AH-1Ws and OH-58Ds armed helicopters took off from landing zones at the naval port in Suao, heading for a neighboring beach for coordinated live fire shootings against surface targets.
These helicopters were supposed to stay over the beach, where a variety of artillery weapons were concentrated, to fire missiles and rockets toward surface targets in coordination with friendly artillery fire.
Because of delay in the process, as the helicopters were about to reach the designated area, their pilots found they were flying into a network of fire from the ground.
Pilots of the helicopters turned around in time to avoid a possible casualty from the friendly fire.
But what remains a mystery is the cause of the delay, which could have resulted in deadly consequences.
It was reported that the delay was caused by a target drone which lost control and fell into the sea after launch from a nearby mountain. After the target drone fell into sea, all the live-fire shootings were halted for several minutes.
As the shootings resumed several minutes later, the original procedure of the exercise might have changed a little, causing confusion to participating troops, reports said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching