The air force plans to urge the US to expedite work to install automatic ground collision avoidance systems (Auto-GCAS) on its F-16V jets, with the aim of completing the process by the end of this year if possible, a military official said yesterday, after an F-16V jet went missing the day earlier.
Authorities have been searching for the missing F-16V aircraft and its pilot, Air Force Captain Hsin Po-yi (辛柏毅), following the incident on Tuesday.
Taiwan plans to have Auto-GCAS installed on all of its F-16V aircraft, a project scheduled for completion in 2028.
Photo: Wang Chin-yi, Taipei Times
Auto-GCAS uses data such as aircraft speed, heading and terrain to assess the risk of a ground or sea collision and alert the pilot.
If the pilot does not respond, the system automatically adjusts the aircraft’s attitude and altitude to prevent a crash.
Asked about the issue at a news conference yesterday, air force Inspector General Chiang Yi-cheng (江義誠) said that the system is being jointly modified by relevant parties in Taiwan, as well as the US National Guard, which also operates F-16 jets.
“We will push the US military to complete work on the systems as soon as possible,” Chiang said. “We hope the work will proceed as planned, if not ahead of schedule, so that we can receive Auto-GCAS and related equipment by the end of the year.”
During the Han Kuang military exercises on June 4, 2018, air force Major Wu Yen-ting (吳彥霆) was killed when the F-16 jet he was piloting, tail No. 6685, crashed into Wufen Mountain (五分山) in Keelung.
The air force subsequently announced that all F-16s would be fitted with Auto-GCAS.
Auto-GCAS is standard equipment on Taiwan’s 66 newly purchased F-16 jets, said Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲), a research fellow at the government-sponsored Institute for National Defense and Security Research.
However, integrating the system into the 139 remaining F-16 aircraft upgraded under the Peace Phoenix Rising project is more complicated, as it involves rewiring, structural modifications to the airframe, and integration with existing fly-by-wire flight control systems, he said.
US military experience shows that Auto-GCAS has saved the lives of hundreds of pilots, making investment in collision-avoidance systems highly cost-effective, Su said.
In addition to accelerating installation, the air force could also follow US practice by issuing pilots military-grade watches, he said.
Such devices provide GPS-based altitude and heading information, allowing basic flight control and landing in situations where cockpit instruments become unreadable due to incidents such as cabin depressurization or avionics failure, he said.
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