Initial indications are that a mechanical malfunction likely caused a Mirage 2000-5 fighter jet to crash off the coast of southeastern Taiwan yesterday, the air force said, as the search for the jet continued.
Based on information from the pilot, who ejected to safety, the jet’s engine was not generating enough power to operate the aircraft safely, air force Chief Inspector Major General Liu Hui-chien (柳惠千) told a news conference.
However, exactly what caused the problem cannot be determined until after the jet’s wreckage has been recovered, Liu said.
Photo: CNA
Lieutenant Colonel Huang Chung-kai (黃重凱), 38, ejected from the aircraft when he noticed the lack of power and landed in the ocean, before being rescued and taken to Taitung Mackay Memorial Hospital, Liu said.
Taitung Mackay Memorial doctors said that Huang was in good health, but they planned to keep him under observation for 48 hours as a precaution in case he developed a lung infection, as he had inhaled some sea water.
The Mirage 2000-5 fighter, serial number 2017, took off from Taitung Air Base at 10:08am on a routine training session.
Photo courtesy of Chao Chien-po
At 11:05am, Huang reported to the base, saying that his jet was experiencing a “mechanical malfunction.”
He ejected at 11:26am, about 10 nautical miles (18.52km) south of Taitung Air Base.
He was rescued at 12:06pm by a UH-60M helicopter, which landed at the base at 12:13pm.
Liu praised Huang for making the call to eject after some preparation and at no lower than 609.6m as recommended, saying that it was what prevented Huang from being injured.
The crashed fighter was manufactured on Feb. 26, 1998, and it last cleared routine inspections on Sept. 29 last year, the air force said.
Huang has logged 1,434 flying hours, with 1,125 hours clocked flying Mirage 2000-5s, it said.
The air force has grounded its Mirage 2000-5 fleet, which would be inspected before being cleared to fly again, Liu said.
Domestically built Indigenous Defense Fighters (IDFs) and F-16s would temporarily take over the Mirage 2000-5 fleet’s duties in responding to incursions into the nation’s air defense identification zone by Chinese military aircraft, Liu said.
To lessen the burden on the IDFs and F-16s while the Mirage 2000-5 fleet is down, the air force would reduce training sessions for those two types of aircraft, he said.
Yesterday’s incident was the eighth involving a Mirage 2000-5 jet since the air force began using them in 1997.
Of those, there were six crashes that left five pilots dead.
The previous crash was in November 2017 when a Mirage 2000 piloted by captain Ho Tzu-yu (何子雨) went missing at sea off the coast of Keelung.
Ho’s body has never been found, and he was declared dead six months later. The jet’s black box was retrieved two years later.
Taiwan now has 54 Mirage 2000-5s.
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
CCP ‘PAWN’? Beijing could use the KMT chairwoman’s visit to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle, an academic said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation. Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending. Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip. “If you truly love Taiwan,
Taiwan has arranged for about 8 million barrels of crude oil, or about one-third of its monthly needs, to be shipped from the Red Sea this month to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and ease domestic supply pressures, CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) said yesterday. The state-run oil company has worked with Middle Eastern suppliers to secure routes other than the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas typically passes, CPC chairman Fang Jeng-zen (方振仁) said at a meeting of the legislature’s Economics Committee in Taipei. Suppliers in Saudi Arabia have indicated they
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
RSS