The Gangshan Veterans’ Village Culture Association has launched efforts to conduct interviews with relatives of those killed in 1968 when a Republic of China Air Force plane crashed in what was Tainan County at the time.
On June 3, 1968, a Curtiss C-46 Commando carrying an unknown number of people took off from the Republic of China Air Force Academy’s airport in Kaohsiung’s Gangshan District (岡山) bound for Taipei.
It crashed near the Jishuei River (急水溪) in Tainan’s Liouying District (柳營), and the cause remains a mystery.
There were no survivors.
Reports from the time said that most of those onboard were military personnel and students from the Gangshan Veterans’ Village who worked or studied in Taipei. They were returning to the capital following the Dragon Boat Festival.
Association director-general Chang Sheng-huang (莊盛晃) on Thursday said that former residents of the village were eager to share information they had about the incident, with some providing cuttings from the now-defunct Minsheng Daily.
Former village residents Chang Chen (常溱), Lee Ting-chung (李定中) and Chou Yen-chu (周燕初) said that Monday, June 3, 1968, was the first working day after the festival.
The plane, operated by the air force’s 6th Wing, had departed from the Pingtung Air Force Base before stopping in Kaohsiung, they said.
According to regulations at the time, military officers and their dependents could take the plane for free, they said.
As Taiwan was under martial law, the military did not report the cause of the crash, nor how many were killed, Chuang said.
The incident was largely forgotten as time passed, he added.
In early 2000, a man surnamed Lien (連) said the gods had told him that a streak of bad luck and family illnesses was because his land was the crash site.
Lien arranged for a shrine to be built at the site, which is now a pineapple plantation, to honor the spirits of those who were killed.
A monument was built next to the shrine after the head of a temple in Pingtung said that spirits of those who died had appeared to her in dreams in 2009 and 2010.
The temple head and Hsu Hao-jan (許浩然) — a classmate of a pilot on the flight, Yang Shang-chieh (楊尚傑) — established the monument, which lists the names of 18 military personnel on the flight.
Chuang said that the association has compiled a list of 25 people on the flight, but it is difficult to determine exactly how many perished.
The C-46 had a capacity of 40 passengers, but plaques on the shrine and monument list 72 names, he said.
Chuang urged the air force to release any information it has about the crash and to establish official monuments at the crash site and at the veterans’ village to give solace to surviving relatives.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS