Former minister of the interior Lee Hong-yuan (李鴻源) this week lambasted the central government’s plan to dedicate 15 of the military’s US-made Black Hawk helicopters to civilian emergency airborne service, calling the decision ludicrous and misguided.
Lee criticized President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) move when he spoke to the media while promoting his new book.
Lee said that UH-60M Black Hawks are sophisticated attack helicopters loaded with advanced weapons and are designed for combat situations — not to carry out search-and-rescue or other civilian emergency missions.
In his new book, the former minister offers his views on and gives advice to the government on managing the nation’s land, forestry and water resources; mitigating natural hazards; and on improving disaster relief and recovery efforts, as undertaken by Ministry of the Interior’s National Airborne Service Corps (NASC).
Lee said the NASC can fulfill its duties with the cheaper AS365 Dauphin 2 helicopters, made by the Eurocopter consortium.
“However, the higher-ups made the ‘brain-impaired’ decision to give Black Hawks to the NASC,” Lee said. “It is as if I only needed a Toyota to get around, but the government insisted on giving me a Rolls Royce or a Ferrari.”
According to military sources, one UN-60 M Black Hawk helicopter costs NT$1.412 billion (US$44.38 million), including pilot training and maintenance costs; while the AS365 Dauphin 2 helicopter is far less expensive, at about NT$200 million per aircraft.
Commenting on the matter, Taiwanese defense analyst Erich Shih (施孝瑋) said: “It is indeed quite strange to assign disaster relief and search-and-rescue work to the Black Hawks. It is an attack aircraft outfitted with M60 machine guns and missiles. It is built for combat and military operations, and its capabilities far exceed that of civilian emergency services.”
Shih said that if Black Hawk helicopters are transferred to the NASC, then the aircraft would have to be reconfigured to have their weapons removed and search lights and other equipment for nighttime operation installed, adding that “each change would cost up to hundreds of millions of NT dollars.”
After many years of negotiation, the nation’s procurement of 60 Sikorsky UH-60M Black Hawk helicopters was finalized in 2010, in a deal worth US$3.1 billion, as part of a US$6.4 billion arms purchase package.
Taiwan took the first batch of four Black Hawks last month and further shipments are to be delivered in coming years.
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