Salvaging the wreckage of a UH-60M Blackhawk helicopter that crashed last month while transporting a patient from Orchid Island (Lanyu, 蘭嶼) could take two to three months, Aviation Safety Council Chairman Hwung Hwung-hweng (黃煌煇) told lawmakers yesterday.
Hwung was at a meeting of the legislature’s Transportation Committee to brief it about the council’s plans for this year, but Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Cheng Pao-ching (鄭寶清) brought up the effort to salvage the National Airborne Service Corp helicopter.
The helicopter disappeared on Feb. 5 after taking off from Lanyu Airport on Orchid Island with six people aboard: three crew, an emergency medical technician, the patient and a family member of the patient. Their bodies have not been found.
Hwung said the council has detected wreckage in the sea and the Ministry of the Interior, which overseas the corp, has hired a contractor to salvage it.
The salvage operation could take two to three months, he said.
The wreckage was located 1,000m below sea level and special equipment is needed for such a recovery operation.
“It would be difficult to twist and maneuver the cables to retrieve the wreckage under such great pressure,” Hwung said, adding that Japan and Singapore have the technology needed to salvage wreckages on the high seas.
It is not clear whether Taiwanese operators could manage such an operation, Hwung said.
DPP Legislator Lin Chun-hsien (林俊憲) said that the government should acquire the capacity to conduct high seas salvage operations.
As Taiwan is surrounded by sea, aircraft are more likely to crash on the water than land, he said.
Cheng also suggested the government move Lanyu Airport from the northwestern half of the island to the east.
Aircraft departing the airport often need to deal with wind shear, he said.
The airport is also not equipped with auxiliary facilities to enhance nighttime visibility, Cheng said.
The Civil Aeronautics Administration needs to address such safety risks, Cheng said.
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