The Aviation Safety Council on Thursday signed an international cooperation agreement with US defense contractor Raytheon for the transfer of the latest technology on flight data management and analyses to enhance the nation’s capabilities in investigating aviation accidents.
The technology that is to be transferred to Taiwan was developed by the Canadian firm Plane Sciences, which will provide training in decoding new flight data recorders (FDR) to the council, the Civil Aeronautics Administration, the four Taiwanese airlines and the military.
Jim Frost, senior manager of Raytheon’s industrial cooperation department, said at the signing ceremony that the council had set its sight on a specific technology for transfer, but it was not readily available.
He said that, prior to the partnership with Raytheon, the council had approached some regional equipment manufacturers of the airplanes and found that specialized training was difficult to find.
“Raytheon looked for potential sources internationally that can provide this type of specialized training. Ultimately, it became clear to us that Plane Sciences is the clear technology leader in this area,” Frost said.
Frost said that Plane Sciences is qualified to provide this type of technology transfer because it is not tied to any specific regional manufacturer and has broad experience in all aspects of accident investigation and processes.
The project would provide Taiwan with the latest information from an international perspective, which is to be taught by instructors with global experience, he said.
Aviation Security Council Executive Director Thomas Wang (王興中) said that the first week of the training would focus on the methods and procedures that have been applied to investigate aviation accidents in other countries.
The second week would focus on studying the new types of FDRs used on Airbus 330 and 380 as well as Boeing 777 planes.
“We want to know how the data recorded on these new FDRs can help find out how accidents happened and understand the cause of accidents. We are looking forward to learning about the technology in this field,” Wang said.
Learning this technology would help reduce the time needed in decoding FDR data, particularly if the recorders have been damaged.
“If a recorder has been damaged in a plane crash, any mishandling of the recorder would cause loss of data. And if we do not know how to properly handle a damaged recorder, we can either ask the manufacturer to send us their engineers or send the machine back to the manufacturer. The process would take us at least two weeks,” Wang said.
“However, if we know the proper equipment to employ or procedures to follow, it would probably take us only three to five days to decode the data on a damaged FDR,” he said.
Wang added that new types of FDRs can record up to 2,000 parameters, and investigators need to determine the parameters to look at to understand how an accident occurred.
Apart from the council, civil flight carriers can also use the training to improve their aviation safety record and operational efficiency, Wang said.
Liya Chu (朱如茵), whose parents are New York-based Taiwanese restaurateurs, has been crowned the champion of US television cooking competition MasterChef Junior, after wowing the judges, including celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, with a feast of fusion cuisine. In the finale of the show’s eighth season, broadcast on Thursday, Chu walked away with US$100,000 after serving a spread of spiced duck breast with scallion pancakes and miso eggplant, followed by coconut pandan panna cotta with a passion fruit coulis and sesame tuille. Chu, who was 10 years old at the time of filming three years ago, faced off against then-11-year-old Grayson Price from
A university student has gained the spotlight for an interactive map he designed detailing all of China’s military bases and installations throughout the Indo-Pacific region. Soochow University music student Joseph Wen (溫約瑟), who calls himself an amateur military enthusiast, said he created the map to “help people better understand the cross-strait situation.” Wen originally posted the map online on June 14 last year, but it gained greater attention after he mentioned it during an appearance on a China Television talk show. On the show, Wen said he had gathered information on the locations from publicly available Web sites, as
RISK FACTORS: ‘We hope people can cooperate and endure it ... it is possibly the very important last mile,’ Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung said Taiwan’s COVID-19 restrictions and mask regulations are to remain the same next month, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday. The center reported 42,112 new local COVID-19 cases and 85 deaths, saying that the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients has dropped to a new low this month. Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the CECC, said that the center is keeping COVID-19 restrictions and mask regulations the same due to the local virus situation, and an increase in the number of imported cases of the new Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 of SARS-CoV-2, among other risk factors. Easing
Opening-day ticket sales for a horror exhibition at the Tainan Art Museum were suspended twice on Saturday as the show attracted too many visitors. Titled “Ghosts and Hells: The Underworld in Asian art,” the exhibition runs until Oct. 16. It is the local version of a show that debuted at the Musee du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris. It was planned and curated by Julien Rousseau. The Tainan museum said that within an hour of its doors opening, more than 1,000 people had entered the exhibition. By noon, 3,000 physical and virtual tickets had been sold, while the museum had more than 4,000