Air force officials said yesterday they are now assessing the chances of recovering a Mirage jet fighter that crashed last Tuesday off the coast of Hualien and sunk to the ocean floor. The cause of the crash has yet to be determined.
"The Navy is not capable of launching a recovery mission in deep sea conditions. As a matter of fact, only a few companies in the world have such a capability, " said Colonel Chin Ping-ho (金秉和), chief of flight safety inspection at the Air Force General Headquarters.
"If we decide to proceed with the recovery operation, we have no choice but to seek help from foreign companies," Chin said.
"The Navy has called a meeting in its Tsoying base to discuss the feasibility of such an operation. We have yet to consult with two pilots from the French manufacturer of the Mirage aircraft before we make a decision," he said. The two Dassault pilots were due to arrive in Taiwan last night.
Chin admitted that chances for recovering the Mirage are extremely slim for a combination of reasons, including depth of the waters where it went down, currents under the sea, and the seabed terrain where it came to rest.
For similar reasons, Chin said, the air force has already given up hopes of recovering two F-16 fighter planes which crashed into seas off Penghu on March 20, 1998, and Green Island on June 1, 1999. Bodies of the three pilots aboard the two planes have yet to be found.
So far, the air force has suffered a loss of six second-generation fighter planes, including four F-16s and two Mirages.
Only the domestically built Indigenous Defense Fighter maintains a zero crash record among second-generation fighter planes, despite experiencing several serious accidents during its development.
Meanwhile, air force General Headquarters spokesman Major General Lai Chin-chun (賴進春) announced the establishment of a task force led by Armed Forces University president General Hsia Yin-chou (夏瀛洲) which will launch a comprehensive check of flight safety problems in the armed services.
The program is to last three to four months starting from next January, and will be conducted by both civilian and military specialists in flight safety.
"After the consecutive crashes of second-generation fighter planes [over the past 19 months], the air force should feel ashamed and do its best to find out what the real problems are," Chin said. "If we can not accomplish this, we should all step down."
To improve flight safety for fighter planes, the air force also plans to concentrate combat flight training in future at an air base in Taitung on the east coast. It will be centered on the use of an existing ACMI (air combat maneuvering instrumentation) system at the base.
Colonel Chang Nien-hua (張念華), chief of operational training at the Air Force General Headquarters, said the plan will be completed next year, when the ACMI is upgraded so that it can cover a larger air space for the maneuvering of fighter planes for training purposes.
"We also hope to separate training from routine combat-readiness missions," Chang said. "In this way, we can provide a better environment for the training of combat pilots."
The US Air Force is also undertaking a review of its own F-16s after it was found that the large number of crashes was due to faulty fuel pumps.
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