An F-5F twin-seat jet fighter that went missing on Friday during routine training off Taitung may have crashed because the two pilots on board were slow in correcting the abnormal flight conditions they were simulating.
The abnormal conditions are part of training courses on ways to adapt to potential flight hazards such as "spatial disorientation," Colonel Chin Ping-ho (金秉和), director of the air force's flight safety department, said yesterday.
Before the plane went missing, the pilot who sat in the front seat of the plane's cockpit rolled the aircraft in an irregular way.
The purpose was to force the rear-seat pilot -- whose section of the cockpit was covered in black material -- to correct the plane's position using data provided by the jet's instrument panel, Chin said.
The front-seat pilot was Major Li Chih-ming (李致民), and the other pilot was Captain Kang Hung-chou (康宏州).
"Major Li might have been too deeply involved in maneuvering the plane irregularly to notice that they were flying into clouds," Chin said. "After the plane flew into the clouds, Major Li might have become as confused as Captain Kang, who could not see anything outside about the real conditions of the plane."
This situation may have led to both pilots becoming disoriented.
"The result might be that both Major Li and Captain Kang tried at the same time to correct the flight conditions of the plane. The correction efforts might have come too late or without any sort of synchronization. Or the two pilots might have been struck with spatial disorientation simultaneously," he said.
"Judging from the altitude of the plane at the time, we presume that the two pilots had only 13 seconds to bring the plane back to normal flight conditions before it went straight down into the sea," he said.
The F-5F was then at an altitude of 4,300m. Its speed of descent was estimated to be 330m per second.
Chin said that the air force has ruled out bird strikes, mechanical failure, or loss of consciousness as possible causes of the accident.
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