The Ministry of National Defense (MND) said yesterday it will go ahead with its original plan to procure 60 US-built Blackhawk helicopters, but will allocate 15 of them to the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) for disaster relief work.
“We reached that decision after consulting with the Interior Ministry,” the defense ministry said in a news statement.
The decision was a reversal from President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) announcement at an Aug. 18 news conference that the military would buy just 45 Blackhawks and reassign NT$10 billion (US$304 million) of its procurement budget to buy disaster relief choppers and related equipment.
Ma’s announcement came in the wake of a crash of an aging UH-1H helicopter from the interior ministry’s National Airborne Service Corps near the Aboriginal settlement of Sandimen (三地門), Pingtung County, on Aug. 11 while on a mission to help Typhoon Morakot victims. The three crewmembers were killed in the crash.
The tragedy spurred calls for the government to modernize the country’s emergency relief capacity and facilities.
The defense ministry said it had decided to stick to the original number of Blackhawks because this would allow it to acquire the new helicopters in the shortest possible time and at the cheapest possible price.
Noting that it has finalized all the preparatory work for the deal, the ministry said any change in the quantity could lead to delivery delays and price adjustments.
The defense ministry said it would give the first 15 Blackhawks to the National Airborne Service Corps for rescue and relief operations.
“In peacetime, the 15 Blackhawks will mainly operate rescue or disaster relief missions, but in wartime, they will be drafted for combat missions,” the defense ministry said.
“This way, our combat preparedness will not be affected while our national resources can be used to the fullest.”it said.
It said it would work out the details on the 15 helicopters’ use with the interior ministry.
The UH-60 Blackhawk is a four-bladed, twin-engine, medium-lift utility helicopter manufactured by Sikorsky Aircraft.
Stressing that the Blackhawk is a multi-functional utility chopper, the defense ministry said acquisition of the new choppers would help upgrade both the country’s disaster relief operations and military logistics support.
The National Airborne Service Corps has long used single-engine UH-1H choppers provided by the military for post-disaster rescue and relief operations. The aircraft are not suitable for use at sea or in high mountains and so the corps has been pushing for the purchase of new helicopters.
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