The air force is to finish installing new ejection seats on all of its F-5 jets by the end of this year, a military source said on Saturday.
The new ejection seats would hopefully end a long-standing safety issue that has led to the death of at least two pilots, the source said.
The Ministry of National Defense last year budgeted NT$746.5 million (US$24.31 million) to install 70 Mk16 ejection seats manufactured by Martin-Baker Aircraft Co on the nation’s fleet of 70 F-5s.
Photo: Ann Wang, REUTERS
The plan was announced after three pilots were killed within a year in incidents involving F-5E jets, leading to speculation that malfunctioning ejection seats contributed to the incidents’ fatal outcomes.
On Oct. 30, 2020, air force Captain Chu Kuan-meng (朱冠甍), 29, ejected from an F-5E during a drill after the jet’s engine malfunctioned. He was later found dead. A postmortem found head trauma and concluded that he died of cerebral bleeding-induced neurogenic shock.
On March 22 last year, air force Lieutenant Luo Shang-hua (羅尚樺), 26, died after his F-5E jet sideswiped another jet, piloted by Captain Pan Ying-chun (潘穎諄), 28. Both pilots died. Luo’s body was found four weeks after the incident.
A postmortem determined that Luo died of neurogenic shock, while forensic examiners could not determine Pan’s cause of death.
The ministry later confirmed that mechanical defects were found in Chu’s and Luo’s ejection seats.
The incidents happened less than six months apart, sparking concern among lawmakers and members of the public, and prompting the ministry to allocate funds for new ejection seats.
The air force installed the first new ejection seat in December last year, and as of the end of June had installed 24 seats, a source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
All 70 new ejection seats are to be installed by the end of this year, they said.
The air force said that the new seats are compatible with the domestically produced T-BE5A “Brave Eagle” Advanced Jet Trainers, so the same seats would be installed on them before they replace the F-5s in 2024.
The decades-old F-5s are mostly used for training purposes, although they could be called into action during wartime, another unnamed air force source said.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS