A UH-60M Black Hawk helicopter on Saturday airlifted a hiker with acute mountain sickness, two days after the helicopter crash that killed eight military officers, the air force said yesterday.
The helicopter was dispatched at about 10:49am from the Chiayi Air Base to help a male hiker in a mountainous area of Hualien County, the air force said in a Facebook post.
After returning to the base, the hiker was transferred to a nearby hospital for treatment, it added.
Photo taken from the Republic of China Air Force Command Headquarters Facebook page
The air force said it would continue to carry out emergency rescue missions, despite Thursday’s crash that killed Chief of the General Staff General Shen Yi-ming (沈一鳴) and seven others in the mountains of New Taipei City’s Wulai District (烏來) on Thursday.
The government had previously announced that it had grounded all of its Black Hawks pending safety checks after the fatal crash.
However, an air force official said yesterday that the grounding only applies to Black Hawk helicopters conducting routine missions and that the air force still has a number of the helicopters ready at all times for emergency rescue missions.
In 2010, Taiwan purchased 60 Black Hawk helicopters from the US at a cost of NT$84.67 billion (US$2.81 billion at the current exchange rate), with 30 assigned to the army, 15 to the Ministry of the Interior’s National Airborne Service Corps (NASC) and 15 to the air force’s Air Rescue Group.
In February 2018, an NASC Black Hawk crashed while transporting a patient from Orchid Island (Lanyu, 蘭嶼) to Taitung, while the helicopter from Thursday’s incident was from the Air Rescue Group.
A small number of Taiwanese this year lost their citizenship rights after traveling in China and obtaining a one-time Chinese passport to cross the border into Russia, a source said today. The people signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of neighboring Russia with companies claiming they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, the source said on condition of anonymity. The travelers were actually issued one-time-use Chinese passports, they said. Taiwanese are prohibited from holding a Chinese passport or household registration. If found to have a Chinese ID, they may lose their resident status under Article 9-1
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
PROBLEMATIC APP: Citing more than 1,000 fraud cases, the government is taking the app down for a year, but opposition voices are calling it censorship Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday decried a government plan to suspend access to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (小紅書) for one year as censorship, while the Presidential Office backed the plan. The Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited security risks and accusations that the Instagram-like app, known as Rednote in English, had figured in more than 1,700 fraud cases since last year. The company, which has about 3 million users in Taiwan, has not yet responded to requests for comment. “Many people online are already asking ‘How to climb over the firewall to access Xiaohongshu,’” Cheng posted on
A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically
RSS