Following the crash of a Republic of China Air Drive F-16V fighter into the ocean on January 6, and the presumed loss of life of pilot Captain Hsin Po-Yi, important particulars concerning prevailing points with the newly modernised American plane have come to gentle. This incident has raised specific issues about when this kind of plane might be outfitted with the “Automated Floor Collision Avoidance System” (Auto GCAS), which was designed to save lots of pilots’ lives. Minister of Nationwide Defence Gu Lixiong had defined on June 8 that the F-16A/B Block 20 fighters procured within the Nineties use analogue flight management system, that are incompatible with the trendy digital anti-collision system designed for plane introduced as much as the F-16V commonplace.
The Republic of China Defence Ministrywas the final consumer for the F-16A/B, which had been phased out of manufacturing for near a decade when it they have been permitted on the market in 1992. The Republic of China’s lack of worldwide recognition, and state of civil struggle with the internationally recognised Individuals’s Republic of China authorities on the Chinese language mainland, made promoting fighters extremely controversial, resulting in a call to supply solely the much less superior older F-16 variants from the Nineteen Seventies. The F-16A/B’s lack of compatibility with trendy subsystems has resulted in a very prolonged integration and modification course of for Auto GCAS. Minister Gu nonetheless pledged that if testing is profitable, set up would start by the top of 2026, with the aim of finishing all installations by the top of 2027.
The Defence Minister additional elaborated that though the Ministry finalised a contract for the the anti-collision system as early as 2020, the technical difficulties concerned, particularly the necessity to combine a digital system with the analog avionics on the older variants of the F-16, have delayed progress. The Republic of China Air Drive had notably claimed on January 11, 2022, that it had begun integrating Auto GCAS with the F-16, and that set up domestically would start in November 2023, elevating important questions concerning the causes of the delays. These points with the F-16V fleet are significantly regarding when contemplating that the fighter kind is relied on to kind the elite of the Air Drive’s fight items, with its F-CK Ching Kuo and Mirage 2000 fighters all being successfully out of date, whereas F-16C/D Block 70 fighters ordered in 2019 have but to be delivered attributable to main manufacturing points and delays in america.
Captain Hsin’s F-16V is assumed to have crashed attributable to a mission laptop malfunction which resulted in his spatial disorientation, along with his probabilities of survival having been diminished by the dearth of chilly climate survival fits on Republic of China Air Drive F-16. This considerably additional will increase dangers to pilots who eject into the ocean. The Air Drive had initially said that deliveries of those fits would start in January 2027. Defence Minister Gu said that the cold-weather survival fits have been solely procured in 2025, after intensive analysis by the Air Drive. The shortage of those fits is especially important contemplating the outstandingly excessive crash charges which Republic of China Air Drive fighter plane have suffered, and the fleet’s coaching predominantly at sea. The crash price of the F-16 has remained far larger than that of the domestically developed F-CK Ching Kuo fighter, though considerably decrease than these of French-supplied Mirage 2000s which have suffered from important qualitative deficiencies and seen eight of the fleet of simply 60 misplaced to crashes.
