▲The accident of the Taiwan Air Force F-16 this year
On 11 January, an F-16V fighter plane numbered 6650 at taiwan's Chiayi Base accidentally crashed into the sea during bombing training (ground attack) in the afternoon of the same day. Circle a useful, F-16V. It is understood that the crashed fighter belongs to the 21st Combat Squadron of the Fourth Tactical Fighter Wing of the Taiwan Air Force, and the aircraft has an age of 24 years and has no major accidents before. As the main model of the Taiwan Air Force, the F-16 has had at least 8 crashes in the more than 20 years of service, and this accident is only more than a year after the last accident. Such a frequent occurrence of serious accidents has made the outside world question the current situation of the Taiwan military, and the reason for the crash is also a matter of opinion, but from a general point of view, it can be divided into two major aspects.
▲The Taiwan Navy launched a search
- A preliminary investigation into the cause of the crash
Pilot factor
First of all, from the perspective of training, the training time and flight time of taiwan air force pilots are seriously insufficient. It is understood that the Taiwan Air Force pilot Chen Yi flew a total of 324.05 hours, and the F-16V aircraft only flew 62.2 hours. As a captain pilot, the total flight time is only more than three hundred hours, and the average annual flight time is only a few tens of hours, which is seriously insufficient. According to the information released by NATO, the minimum flight time of fighter pilots must reach about 120 hours a year to maintain a good flight state. The flight time can not keep up, will cause the pilot to be inexperienced, prone to operational errors, in the face of sudden problems to deal with difficulties, which will directly lead to serious flight accidents such as crashes.
▲ Wang Wenchang, who reached the age of flight and was gloriously grounded
The PLA, on the other hand, is much better. According to state media reports, in June 2020, Wang Wenchang, a pilot of a brigade of the People's Liberation Army Air Force Aviation Corps, often reached the upper limit of flight age and was honorably grounded. As a special pilot, Wang Wenchang flew a fighter plane safely for 5290 hours, with an average annual flight time of more than 200 hours. Combined with the data released by the Russian media in early 2014, the average flight hours of PLAaf and Naval Aviation pilots in 2013 have reached 180 hours, which can determine that PLA pilots have long surpassed the Taiwan Air Force when flying in 2013.
Taiwan Air Force pilots may have serious psychological problems
According to Liu Huiqian, inspector general of Taiwan's "Air Force Command," the pilot kept holding down the radio microphone call button throughout the flight, which caused the air and ground to be unable to intercept his call, which was very abnormal, indicating that the pilot was likely to have psychological problems and deliberately caused the crash. In fact, due to the continuous crashes of various types of fighters in the Taiwan Air Force, the pilots of the Taiwan Air Force have accumulated a certain psychological pressure, especially the pilots like the F-5E have even developed a fear of the fighter. Since the end of 2019, the Taiwan Air Force has continued to track PLA military aircraft that appear in the airspace of southwest Taiwan, which has further aggravated psychological pressure. Taiwan media people once said in a program that "the pilots of the Taiwan military are extremely stressed, and they are also worried about sleeping at home." Long-term huge psychological pressure will directly lead to mental illness, and the possibility of a man-made crash will also increase significantly.
▲Suspected crash wreckage
The problem with the fighter itself
Many years ago, the Taiwan authorities launched an F-16V performance improvement project with a total amount of nearly 10 billion US dollars and code-named "Fengzhan Project", the essence of which was to comprehensively upgrade the original F-16 of the Taiwan Air Force to enhance combat effectiveness. The F-16V that crashed on the 11th is one of the "Fengzhan Project", which was just upgraded in mid-November last year, and looks like a quasi-refurbished machine, but the problem is most likely to appear in the refurbishment. As mentioned earlier, the aircraft has been 24 years old, the service time is not short, for such an older aircraft, the renovation and upgrading itself is very difficult, after all, with the increase of service time, metal fatigue is becoming more and more serious, and the comprehensive upgrade process is very likely to amplify this metal fatigue, in serious cases, the aircraft can be directly disintegrated in the air, the consequences are unimaginable.
At the same time, the "Phoenix Exhibition Project" itself also has hidden dangers. The upgrade is based on the F-16A block20 and F-16B block20, and the upgrade to F-16V is large. One of the upgrade items is to replace the power system, from the original F100-PW-229(E) to F110-GE-129 or Pratt & Whitney F100-PW-229, but due to different models, the engine compartment design was changed during the upgrade process, but this change is likely to affect the reliability of the aircraft. Coupled with the fact that the F-16V itself has been bumpy in the upgrade process, there is every reason to suspect that this upgrade has had an unknown impact on the reliability of Taiwan military fighters.
In addition, the Taiwan Air Force's maintenance is not timely or is also a potential cause of flight accidents. As early as 2007, the Taiwan Air Force had exposed a case of fake repair of fighter aircraft, in which Taiwan Hanxiang Company won the bid for the maintenance of part of the Taiwan Air Force's military aircraft, and then subcontracted the "X-ray detection" business to the "Zoomlion Non-Destructive Inspection Company", but the Zoomlion Company did not carry out military aircraft testing in accordance with the contract, and was suspected of forging testing project logs and fraudulently collecting project funds from Hanxiang Company to obtain illegal benefits from it. The illegal benefits obtained by this kind of malpractice case are small, directly affecting the reliability of military aircraft and taking the lives of pilots as a joke, which is a complete and utter hasty death.
▲ Did the F-16 Taiwan that rushed off the runway be repaired?
Although more than a decade has passed since this incident, some of the maintenance projects of Taiwan's military aircraft are still outsourced, so it is not excluded that there are still malpractices. In addition, as early as 2020, the Taiwan media exposed that the "engine maintenance detachment" responsible for the repair of the F-16 engine at Taiwan's Hualien Air Force Base privately brought wine into the camp in early December, and had a carnival with 3 non-commissioned officers in the camp area, and then uploaded the relevant videos to social networking sites to show off. With such a disciplined ground maintenance team, who can guarantee the stability and reliability of fighters?
Of course, it is not excluded that other sudden external factors cause accidents in the fighter, such as bird collision accidents. Although the F-16V has been upgraded to the powertrain, it is still a single-engine design, and once it is inhaled into large birds, it will instantly destroy the turbine blades of the engine and cause an air stop. If the flight altitude is too low at this time, the pilot is inexperienced in dealing with sudden accidents, and the crash will be difficult to avoid.
2. Where does the Taiwan Air Force go in the future?
Judging from the statistics of the Taiwan Air Force in the past three years, its accident rate has always remained high, and the proportion of serious accidents such as aircraft destruction and death is still extremely high. Faced with such problems, where will the Taiwan Air Force go in the future? In a nutshell – the foreseeable future is not optimistic.
▲ The wreckage of the F-5E that crashed in the previous Taiwan Air Force
Unsolvable fighter puzzles
For the current Taiwan Air Force, it can be said that "Wang Xiao'er's New Year is not as good as a year." Relevant statistics show that as of the beginning of 2020, the Taiwan Air Force has 141 F-16A/B fighters, 129 IDF fighters, 55 Mirage-2000 fighters and 25 F-5 fighters, a total of 350 fighters. It looks like the scale is quite intimidating, but fighters like the F-5 and Mirage-2000 have long reached the end of their service, and the service time is basically only about five years. Once these two fighters are all retired, the total size of the Taiwan Air Force will be reduced by 80 in an instant, leaving only 270 aircraft. Are you hoping for 66 new F-16Vs purchased from the U.S.? Although according to the relevant agreement, Loma will deliver all 66 F-16V in 2026, but in the consistent style of the United States, do not drag on for ten years and eight years, and make more money, these fighters will certainly not be delivered.
How long can the IDF last?
And that's not all. The F-16A/B currently equipped by the Taiwan Air Force is a model introduced in the 1990s, which has been in service for more than 20 years and has been running for 30 years immediately. Under the normal use case, the service time of a fighter is thirty years, which means that the Taiwan Air Force and a number of F-16A/B will also face the problem of retirement. This is the absolute main model of the Taiwan Air Force, how can we fill this hole and rely on huge expenses to upgrade all F-16A/B to F-16V? Obviously unrealistic.
Four main machines, three are facing retirement, leaving only Taiwan's self-manufactured IDF. However, the reliability of this fighter itself is extremely low, small problems are continuous, the Taiwan Air Force is not satisfied, and the main target of the aircraft design is the People's Liberation Army's J-7, J-8, in the case of no hope of upgrading, the IDF has also reached the end of service. It is no exaggeration to say that if there is no interference from the outside world, in another ten years or so, the strength of Taiwan's air force will be greatly reduced, and it would be good to have fighters take off, let alone confront the mainland!
Moreover, do not forget that in recent years, the PLA's routine patrol of Taiwan's airspace has caused the Taiwan Air Force to be tired of responding, and fighters have frequently taken off and landed, as early as 2020, Huang Zhiwei, then Taiwan's "Air Force Chief of Staff," disclosed that from the beginning of 2020 to October 21, the Taiwan Air Force dispatched 4,596 aircraft to correspond to PLA military aircraft. Compared with the 2972 sorties on October 7, it is an increase of 1624 flights in half a month. This kind of high-frequency take-off and landing has further accelerated the aging of fighters, and for a long time to come, the Taiwan military will still face this kind of high-frequency pressure.
▲ Taiwan's retired air force pilot Tian Dingzhong directly complained
Pilots are becoming scarcer
In fact, while fighter planes continue to take off to "deal with" PLA military planes, Taiwan Air Force pilots are also under both physical and mental pressure. However, with the deterioration of cross-strait relations and the increase in the possibility of local conflicts, the Taiwan Air Force once experienced a wave of retirement. Like Chen Yi, who was in this crash, the F-5 fighter, which had just flown for more than two hundred hours, quickly flew the F-16V, which also reflected the shortage of pilots in the Taiwan Air Force. To this end, Tian Dingzhong, a retired taiwan air force pilot, said bluntly that "nowadays, there is an urgent shortage of pilots in Taiwan, and sometimes a cat and a dog think that they can call him in." Such pilots can not say that they have improved their combat capabilities, and it is fortunate to be able to maintain the existing combat capabilities, and this problem is more difficult to solve and more deadly than the shortage of fighters.
In the face of the constant crashing of fighter planes and the constant loss of life of Air Force pilots, it is time for the Taiwan authorities to reflect on it, and if they continue to act willfully, they will certainly pay an even heavier price in the future. Well, pay attention to the blade, pay attention to Ma Yan, thanks for watching, see you in the next issue.