The Control Yuan yesterday censured the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) and the Air Force Command for their roles in a deadly F-16 crash in New Taipei City in 2018, and ordered them to make improvements.
The Control Yuan said in a statement that the decision was based on the conclusions of an investigative report approved on Thursday last week by its Committee on National Defense and Intelligence Affairs, which probed the accident that occurred in Rueifang District (瑞芳) on June 4, 2018.
Half an hour after taking off from Hualien Air Base to take part in a major annual drill, pilot Wu Yen-ting’s (吳彥霆) single-seat F-16 jet crashed into Wufenshan (五分山), killing him, apparently due to “human error” by air force and civilian flight controllers, the report said.
The Control Yuan blamed the crash on negligence and lack of discipline at the Air Operations Center of the Air Force Command, after finding that five of the officers involved were not fully prepared for the mission and did not carry out the mission based on standard procedures due to a lack of training.
Citing the report, the Control Yuan said the accident occurred after personnel at the center instructed Wu to veer off his original course after he was already airborne, which is against standard procedure.
The center also ordered the pilot to maintain an altitude of 2,000 feet (609.6m) even though he reported heavy clouds, instead of having the jet climb to a safe altitude, in part because center personnel were not properly trained in using a ground proximity warning system, the Control Yuan said.
The control tower at Taipei International Airport (Songshan airport), which is supervised by the CAA, was also censured by the Control Yuan for failing to observe air traffic management procedures, as the military drill required close coordination between civilian and military air traffic controllers.
The Songshan control tower should have given priority to the F-16 as it approached Keelung on Taiwan’s northeastern coast, the report said.
However, the tower had entered the wrong coordinates for its flight control area that day and directed the jet based on that inaccurate information, it said.
It also did not give priority “air traffic service” to the F-16 as required by standard procedure, the report said.
Instead, it asked the center to have the F-16 veer east, although it allowed the plane to climb above 2,000 feet.
Knowing that a passenger aircraft was about to take off from Songshan airport, the center ordered the F-16 to maintain its altitude.
By the time the commercial aircraft had passed Keelung and the center asked the F-16 to increase its altitude, it was too late, the Control Yuan said.
The findings indicate that the center and the Songshan control tower were both responsible for the crash, and need to make improvements to address the problems, the Control Yuan said.
The censure came days after the Control Yuan on Wednesday last week impeached five Air Operations Center officers — Shih Ching-nien (史青年), Lai Wen-sheng (賴文生), Lu I-shun (盧易舜), Chuang Chun-yuan (莊春源) and Ou Chien-fei (區劍飛) — who were found to be primarily responsible for the accident.
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
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
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