The air force yesterday conducted a rare public drill, loading locally made cruise missiles that reportedly can reach coastal Chinese provinces, amid an increase in military threats from Beijing.
Flight personnel from the First Tactical Fighter Wing loaded an Indigenous Defense Fighter (IDF) jet with Wan Chien air-to-ground cruise missiles at Tainan Air Base.
The missile, developed by the military’s top research unit, the Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology, is said to be able to hit Chinese airports and military units in China’s Fujian and Guangdong provinces if fired from Taiwanese fighter jets from near the median line of the Taiwan Strait.
Photo: Ritchie B. Tongo, EPA-EFE
However, Colonel Lee Ching-shi (李慶熙), head of political warfare for the First Tactical Fighter Wing, declined to comment on the missiles’ range or whether air force fighters have already been armed with them on routine patrols.
The drill, which was open to the press, was part of the pre-Lunar New Year holiday drill that the military holds annually to show the public that the armed forces are combat-ready at all times.
An emergency takeoff drill was also held at the base to simulate a Chinese air invasion. It took only about five minutes for an IDF to take off after its pilot heard the scramble alarm.
The drill was held after 29 Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) military aircraft crossed into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) in the past three days.
Four PLA aircraft yesterday entered Taiwan’s ADIZ, according to the Ministry of National Defense’s Web site.
That marks the 22nd day this month that China has sent aircraft into the nation’s ADIZ.
Asked to comment on the high frequency of Chinese intrusions, Lee said that the air force is under tremendous pressure, but would always be ready for combat to safeguard the nation’s airspace.
Lee said that the Taichung-based Third Tactical Fighter Wing has deployed another squadron of IDF jets at Magong Airport in outlying Penghu County, so that it would be able to respond immediately to any Chinese activity.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater