Three European-built EC225 Super Puma helicopters were officially commissioned into the air force at a ceremony yesterday, providing a welcome boost to the nation’s search-and-rescue (SAR) capabilities.
During the ceremony, held at Songshan Air Force Base in Taipei, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) told a large gathering of military personnel and foreign dignitaries that the armed forces’ disaster response work in recent years had earned them the trust of the public.
The EC225, built by the France-based Eurocopter, an EADS subsidiary, has a maximum takeoff weight of about 11 tonnes and can accommodate two pilots, four crew and as many as 20 passengers or three stretchers, according to the builder’s Web site. The twin-engine, five-rotor-blade helicopter has a maximum endurance of five hours and 38 minutes, a maximum speed of 324kph and a maximum range of 838km.
Photo: AFP
The Super Pumas are the first European-built helicopters to serve in the Air Force’s rescue squadron, joining the Sikorsky S-70Cs, the nation’s main workhorse for search and rescue operations, which were acquired in the 1980s and 1990s. The total price tag for the three helicopters was NT$3.6 billon (US$120 million).
About 900 EC225s have been ordered by 52 countries, the company said on its Web site.
Following a flyby by F-16s, F-CK-1 “Ching Kuo” Indigenous Defense Fighters, Mirage 2000 and AT-3 trainers, the audience was treated to a live demonstration of the S-70C and EC225’s flight and rescue capabilities.
Colonel Chen Tung-sheng (陳東昇), who heads the air force’s rescue squadron, told reporters at the ceremony that the automatic flight control systems and other advanced devices featured on the EC225 would be especially beneficial during nighttime operations.
One S-70C-6 Super Blue Hawk crashed at sea during a nighttime rescue mission off Orchid Island in March, leaving four of the five occupants missing. In 1995, a S-70C-1 crashed into a mountain during bad weather, killing all on board.
Chen said the Super Pumas would be on standby to provide search and rescue starting today, adding that pilots would be trained to be able to fly both the S-70C and EC225.
The helicopters will be based at the 455th Tactical Fighter Wing at Chiayi Air Base.
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