The Aviation Safety Council on Thursday signed an international cooperation agreement with US defense contractor Raytheon for the transfer of the latest technology on flight data management and analyses to enhance the nation’s capabilities in investigating aviation accidents.
The technology that is to be transferred to Taiwan was developed by the Canadian firm Plane Sciences, which will provide training in decoding new flight data recorders (FDR) to the council, the Civil Aeronautics Administration, the four Taiwanese airlines and the military.
Jim Frost, senior manager of Raytheon’s industrial cooperation department, said at the signing ceremony that the council had set its sight on a specific technology for transfer, but it was not readily available.
He said that, prior to the partnership with Raytheon, the council had approached some regional equipment manufacturers of the airplanes and found that specialized training was difficult to find.
“Raytheon looked for potential sources internationally that can provide this type of specialized training. Ultimately, it became clear to us that Plane Sciences is the clear technology leader in this area,” Frost said.
Frost said that Plane Sciences is qualified to provide this type of technology transfer because it is not tied to any specific regional manufacturer and has broad experience in all aspects of accident investigation and processes.
The project would provide Taiwan with the latest information from an international perspective, which is to be taught by instructors with global experience, he said.
Aviation Security Council Executive Director Thomas Wang (王興中) said that the first week of the training would focus on the methods and procedures that have been applied to investigate aviation accidents in other countries.
The second week would focus on studying the new types of FDRs used on Airbus 330 and 380 as well as Boeing 777 planes.
“We want to know how the data recorded on these new FDRs can help find out how accidents happened and understand the cause of accidents. We are looking forward to learning about the technology in this field,” Wang said.
Learning this technology would help reduce the time needed in decoding FDR data, particularly if the recorders have been damaged.
“If a recorder has been damaged in a plane crash, any mishandling of the recorder would cause loss of data. And if we do not know how to properly handle a damaged recorder, we can either ask the manufacturer to send us their engineers or send the machine back to the manufacturer. The process would take us at least two weeks,” Wang said.
“However, if we know the proper equipment to employ or procedures to follow, it would probably take us only three to five days to decode the data on a damaged FDR,” he said.
Wang added that new types of FDRs can record up to 2,000 parameters, and investigators need to determine the parameters to look at to understand how an accident occurred.
Apart from the council, civil flight carriers can also use the training to improve their aviation safety record and operational efficiency, Wang said.
China’s Office of the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hong Kong has asked foreign consulates in Hong Kong to submit details of their local staff, which is more proof that the “one country, two systems” model no longer exists, a Taiwanese academic said. The office sent letters dated Monday last week to consulates in the territory, giving them one month to submit the information it requires. The move followed Beijing’s attempt to obtain floor plans for all properties used by foreign missions in Hong Kong last year, which raised concerns among diplomats that the information could be used for
‘ABNORMITY’: News of the military exercises on the coast of the Chinese province facing Taiwan were made public by the Ministry of National Defense on Thursday Taiwan’s military yesterday said it has detected the Chinese military initiating a round of exercises at a bay area in coastal Fujian Province, which faces Taiwan, since early yesterday morning and it has been closely monitoring the drills. The exercises being conducted at Fujian’s Dacheng Bay featured an undisclosed number of People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) warplanes, warships and ground troops, the Ministry of National Defense said in a press statement. The ministry did not disclose what kind of military exercises are being conducted there and for how long they would be happening, but it did say that it has been closely watching
Recent movements by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have been “highly unusual,” but the military maintains a grasp of the situation, Minister of National Defense Chiu Kuo-cheng (邱國正) said on Friday, after the military for the first time said it was monitoring troop movements in China’s Dacheng Bay (大埕灣). The minister gave the remarks to reporters before appearing at the legislature on the first day of its new session. The Ministry of National Defense on Thursday evening released an air force surveillance photograph of a PLA Shaanxi Y-8 anti-submarine aircraft, and said it was monitoring the PLA Rocket Force and ground
Noting that researchers have found that 85 China-based blogs and accounts were spreading a conspiracy theory that a US “meteorological weapon” had caused recent fires in Hawaii, political observers in Taiwan said the nation also needs to be vigilant of Beijing employing similar disinformation campaigns against Taiwan. The untrue content concerning Hawaii was written in 15 languages and disseminated across a myriad of platforms including Facebook, YouTube and X, a report published in Gizmodo said, citing NewsGuard, an online news content ranker. The effort represented the most expansive Chinese informational operation to be uncovered by NewsGuard to date, Gizmodo said. The conspiracy theory