China is not qualified to participate in the International Transportation Safety Association (ITSA) Chairman’s Meeting in Taipei next year because of its failure to conduct independent investigations of transportation accidents, the Taiwan Transportation Safety Board (TTSB) confirmed yesterday.
“Unlike the TTSB, China has never uploaded its investigation reports of transportation accidents online and allowed the public to critique it, nor has it translated investigation reports of aviation accidents into English and sent them to the International Civil Aviation Organization,” TTSB chairman Young Hong-tsu (楊宏智) said on the sidelines of a forum marking the board’s third anniversary.
“As such, China has never qualified to participate in the meetings over the years, and we have been free from interference from Beijing in participating in the meetings in the past two decades,” he said.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
Taiwan first hosted the annual meeting in Taipei in 2010 after Young participated in the event during his tenure as the executive director of the then-Aviation Safety Council from 2005 to 2009.
The council was upgraded to the TTSB following the derailment of a Puyuma Express train in Yilan County in 2018, which killed 18 people and injured more than 200.
Young was appointed as the first chairman of the board in 2019. While attending the ITSA meeting in Helsinki this year, he proposed holding the international event again in Taipei next year.
Accident investigation officials around the world are invited to attend, including the US, the UK, France, Germany, Argentina, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, India and Indonesia, Young said.
Russia was not able to attend this year’s ITSA meeting following Finland’s boycott over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, Young said.
Whether Russia would be able to participate in next year’s meeting would depend on the government’s policy regarding this matter then, he added.
Vice President William Lai (賴清德) said in a speech at the forum yesterday that aside from investigating transportation accidents, the board should conduct periodic evaluations of railway and aviation service operators’ safety measures.
Young later told reporters that the board’s responsibility is to investigate transportation accidents, rather than evaluating transportation service providers.
“I think the vice president was inspired after hearing my presentation of what we have accomplished in the past three years. We need to prevent accidents from happening, but this requires cooperation from transportation service providers and government agencies overseeing them,” he said.
Deputy Minister of the Interior Chen Tsung-yen (陳宗彥) has signaled the ministry’s intention to work with the board to establish an evaluation system for highway service operators and the National Airborne Service Corps, Young said.
The board would examine the results before determining whether the same model could be replicated in other transportation services, he added.
Young urged the Executive Yuan to quickly approve a NT$1.76 billion (US$58.71 million) budget for a transportation safety research facility in Yilan County.
The facility will have branch offices in different regions across the nation to speed up the process of collecting evidence for investigation, he said.
Since the legislature passed the Space Development Act (太空發展法) last year, the board is also in charge of investigating spaceflight-related incidents and accidents, in addition to investigating railway, highway and waterway incidents and accidents, Young said.
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