The shuttered Taoyuan Air Base should be reopened to meet the challenges posed by China’s increased incursions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ), Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Legislator Chiu Chen-yuan (邱臣遠) said yesterday.
“It takes 15 minutes for our Mirage fighter jets to take off from the Hsinchu Air Base to reach the area of Chinese intrusion,” Chu said.
“If our fighter jets were launched from the Taoyuan base, they would only need six minutes to reach our air defense zone’s northeast sector,” he said. “We urgently need to bolster air defense capacity for northern Taiwan, so the Taoyuan Air Base must be reopened.”
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
“It is a vital national security and military issue, and we must start now to renovate its runways and air tower facilities, to reinstate it as an air force base, so that it can reduce the burden of defending northern Taiwan,” he said.
The air force said in a news release that all military installations must be carefully assessed and meet current national security needs.
Situated southeast of Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, Taoyuan Air Base dates back to 1944.
It was used for Taiwan and US air force missions during the Cold War, including Taiwan-US reconnaissance missions by the Black Cat Squadron, which flew U-2 surveillance aircraft over China from 1961 to 1974.
The air force stopped using it in 2007, when it became the Taoyuan Naval Base. It closed down in August 2013 and was designated a historic monument in 2016.
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
A bipartisan group of US senators has introduced a bill to enhance cooperation with Taiwan on drone development and to reduce reliance on supply chains linked to China. The proposed Blue Skies for Taiwan Act of 2026 was introduced by Republican US senators Ted Cruz and John Curtis, and Democratic US senators Jeff Merkley and Andy Kim. The legislation seeks to ease constraints on Taiwan-US cooperation in uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), including dependence on China-sourced components, limited access to capital and regulatory barriers under US export controls, a news release issued by Cruz on Wednesday said. The bill would establish a "Blue UAS
RSS