The air force needs to undergo an overall review of its operations to address recent human lapses in maintenance and supervision, Air Force Commander General Yen Ming (嚴明) said yesterday.
“Screws have come loose in some areas of our operations,” Yen said just days after an F-5F twin-seater jet and an RF-5E reconnaissance plane crashed separately into mountains in Yilan County on Tuesday during a nighttime training mission, killing three pilots. “We will conduct a thorough review and plug the gaps as soon as possible.”
After paying tribute to the three pilots, whose remains are being kept in a funeral hall at the Hualien Military General Hospital, Yen said he felt deep regret and distress over their loss and the loss of the aircraft.
“The cause of the mishap is still being investigated. An air force task force and experts from the Aviation Safety Council are piecing together recovered aircraft parts and equipment to reconstruct the sequence of events leading up to the crashes,” Yen said.
He said that there was room for improvement in the air force’s maintenance, manpower training and flight discipline. However, he said that although the service’s supervision and accountability had room to improve, the air force would not have sent pilots on training missions using defective aircraft.
“Only aircraft that meet safety standards are allowed to carry out flight missions. This is the principal guideline and there are no compromises,” Yen said.
Although the F-5 fleet has been in service for decades, key components and parts have been renewed, Yen said, adding that both of the ill-fated airplanes had passed regular inspections and they were classified as above minimum safety standard. Judging from radar screens and the plane’s flight paths, the two aircraft were slightly off course, Yen said.
Aside from the F-5F accidents, the air force also faced a controversy on Tuesday after a Mirage 2000-5 fighter jet was found to have a loose pipe cover on its engine tail upon its return to a Hsinchu air base after a series of tactical flight drills. Yen said it was later discovered that the flaw resulted from the negligence of a maintenance worker. He said the worker had been expelled from the maintenance division and would undergo further training and evaluation to see whether he could be reassigned.
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