The air force has shelved nine Mirage 2000-5 jets because of a lack of spare parts supplied by France, media reported.
A story published in Sunday’s edition of the Chinese-language China Times quoted an unnamed Air Force official as saying that the jets had been put in reserve with assistance from France.
The planes underwent tests so that they can be reactivated later and could be used in combat in the event of a conflict, he said.
The delivery of spare parts could resume by the end of the year, the official said.
The media report came one month after Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lin Yu-fang (林郁方) told the legislature that difficulties in obtaining spare parts for maintenance had prompted the air force to cut each Mirage pilot’s monthly training from 15 hours to six.
Taiwan ordered 150 F-16A/Bs from the US and 60 Mirage 2000-5s from France in 1992 as part of a defense package.
The F-16 and Mirage, together with 130 self-developed Indigenous Defense Fighters (IDFs), form the backbone of the air force fleet.
Taiwan has also met difficulty in obtaining F-16C/Ds from the US to replace its outdated F-16A/Bs. Taiwan and US analysts have said US President Barack Obama may approve the F-16C/D sale after visiting China later this month.
Noting that there is evidence that China has increased to more than 1,500 the number of short and medium-range missiles it has deployed across the strait from Taiwan, David Brown, an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, recently urged Obama to sell Taipei the military hardware it has requested to deter a potential attack by China.
Brown made the call in an analysis published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY STAFF WRITER
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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