The air force yesterday corrected a misbelief that Chinese fighter planes could reach Taiwan in 17 minutes, saying they could do so in just 10 minutes.
The correction was made by the Taichung-based 427th Fighter Wing, which is composed solely of domestically built Indigenous Defense Fighters (IDF), during a trip arranged by the Ministry of National Defense for the media.
The 427th wing is based in Tai-chung County's Chinchuankang air base, the largest in Southeast Asia.
PHOTO: CHIANG YING-YING, TAIPEI TIMES
"The base sits at a distance of 126 miles [203km] and 163 miles [262km] away from the two nearest air bases across the Taiwan Strait in China. Chinese fighter planes can reach Taiwan within 10 minutes if they are not intercepted from our side," said Major Lin Kuo-yu (林國裕), a pilot with the wing.
Over the past few weeks, several reports have quoted the 17-minute figure, which originated in a research report written by a group of academics that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) used as the basis for its assessment of Chinese military power.
"The IDF is the only fighter in the air force that is capable of scrambling within five minutes," Lin said.
"If they are airborne within five minutes, our IDFs should be able to intercept Chinese fighter planes before they reach the middle line of the Taiwan Strait," another pilot said, referring to the unofficial border that runs along the Taiwan Strait equidistant between the two countries.
The 427th wing yesterday showed off to the press the five-minute emergency take-off of the IDF, a procedure that must be completed without any margin for error.
Two single-seat IDFs demonstrated the whole procedure, starting from receiving orders to leaving the ground.
The Chinchuankang-based 427th wing is one of only two IDF wings of the air force. The other is the Tainan-based 443rd wing.
The IDF is one of the second-generation fighter planes of the air force which went into service in 1990s.
Other second-generation fighters include the US-made F-16 A/B and French-built Mirage 2000-5.
The IDF has the highest combat readiness ratio and lowest crash rate among the second-generation fighters, even though two of the two-seat versions of the plane crashed last year during training missions.
To the relief of the Aerospace Industrial Development Corporation, which developed the IDF, investigations by the air force showed that the two crashes were the result of human error more than any other factors.
One of the two senior pilots who were instructing trainees when the fighters crashed has been grounded.
The IDF's current role is interception using beyond-visual-range weapons such as the locally-developed Tien ChienII medium-range air-to-air missile. The Tien ChienII is claimed by many air force officials to be equivalent to the US-made AIM-120 missile.
In the future, the IDF will be armed with several other locally-developed weapons, such as a missile capable of destroying airport runways.
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