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Fighter pilots consult the stars ahead of takeoff

The air force apparently no longer considers flying to be a pure science and has turned to the supernatural for help in determining what days are safe for a fighter pilot to fly.

Air force officials said that fortune-telling software from Singapore was introduced two years ago to help fighter pilots determine what their luck would be on a day they are scheduled to fly.

If there are bad omens for that day, the pilots could ask for their flight mission to be cancelled.

The fortune-telling program is one of the measures that the air force has adopted in recent years in a bid to minimize the chances of crashes. It has suffered more than 630 in the past five decades.

The fortune-telling software was introduced when General Chen Chao-ming (陳肇敏), now deputy minister of national defense for armament, was the commander-in-chief of the service.

A senior air force official, who declined to be identified, said they have yet to determine whether the program has contributed to flight safety in the past two years.

"We tend to take the results of divination as references only. We cannot totally count on them. A fighter pilot could ask not to fly if he finds he will have bad luck that day. We will respect his wishes," the official, a former pilot, said.

"But if a pilot believes too much in the divination results, we will consider grounding him temporarily or permanently. In principle, a pilot can not use the divination results to cancel his scheduled flights more than three times," he said.

A more scientific measure, introduced about the same time as the fortune-telling program, appears to have had more of an impact on flight safety, as least as far as the human factor is concerned.

It is the testing of the oxygen level in a pilot's blood. The blood test is performed before each scheduled mission and is an effective and quick way to know whether the pilot is physically fit for the mission.

In the past, many fighter pilots were known to spend the night before a mission playing mahjong. Many plane crashes were suspected to have been caused by pilots' failure to stay in good shape, but relevant data was not available from the air force.

Now, no pilot can lie about his or her physical condition before a flight since the oxygen-level test will tell everything.
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