The air force yesterday said that it has detected a signal similar to what would be sent from the black box of the Mirage 2000 fighter jet that went missing off the northeastern coast of Taiwan on Tuesday last week.
The signal was detected in the vicinity of where the jet disappeared from radar screens, but the military is still not sure it had been indeed sent by the missing plane.
The signal’s wavelength is similar to that sent by the black box of a Mirage 2000, air force Lieutenant General Chang Yen-ting (張延廷) said.
However, such signals are regularly affected by interference from ocean currents and the seabed, and the rescue team has to locate where the signal was sent from before reclaiming the device to determine if it is from the missing jet’s black box, Chang said.
The aircraft, piloted by Captain Ho Tzu-yu (何子雨), took off at 6:09pm on a regular nighttime training exercise before losing contact with the control tower at 6:43pm about 90 nautical miles (166.7km) north-northeast of Keelung.
Despite an intensive search since the night of the jet’s disappearance, rescue teams have failed to locate the plane or its pilot.
As of yesterday, there were 93 military aircraft searching for the pilot and the aircraft, which were from the Hsinchu-based 499th Tactical Fighter Wing.
The air force’s statement came after Lee Wen-yu (李文玉), a former air force test pilot who is now a civilian airline pilot, yesterday said on Facebook that he detected similar emergency locator transmitter signals twice, on Friday and on Sunday, while flying over waters where Ho’s plane was last seen on radar.
Lee said that the signals could have been sent by Ho’s Mirage-2000.
He said other civilian plane pilots also picked up 121.5MHz SOS signals off Keelung after the plane went missing and they thought the military rescue team must have picked up the same signals.
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