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Taipei, Taiwan:
Taiwan has grounded all of its F16 fighter jets for security checks as rescuers proceed to seek for one which went lacking throughout a coaching train, authorities stated Wednesday.
The determination removes round 150 planes from Taiwan’s skies, leaving the democratic island counting on an much more restricted fleet to warn off Chinese jets which have been buzzing it at an unprecedented price in latest months.
The air power stated a single-seat F16 flown by a 44-year-old pilot disappeared from radar at an altitude of some 6,000 ft (1,800 metres) two minutes after taking off from Hualien air base in japanese Taiwan on Tuesday night time.
The disappearance comes lower than three weeks after a pilot was killed when his F-5E fighter jet crashed into the ocean throughout coaching, prompting an analogous grounding.
“The rescue mission is our top priority now. The air force has grounded all F16s for checks and I’ve instructed an investigation into the cause of the incident,” President Tsai Ing-wen informed reporters.
Taiwan lives beneath the fixed risk of invasion by China, which views the island as its personal territory and has vowed to grab it in the future, by power if needed.
Its fleet of fighters is previous and massively outgunned by China’s. Without the F16s, it consists of the locally-built Indigenous Defence Fighter, French-built Mirages from the late 1990s and F5-E fighters that date again to the 1970s.
There have been seven crashes involving F16s since Taiwan took supply of the fighters bought from the United States in 1997.
Taiwan has scrambled its planes at double the speed of final 12 months to guard in opposition to China’s elevated incursions into its defensive zone.
Analysts say Beijing’s fly-bys are designed to check the island’s defence responses but additionally to wear down its fighters, which come nearer to expiry with every sortie.
Taiwan’s navy has been battered by a string of air crashes this 12 months.
In January, eight senior officers together with the chief of the overall employees have been killed in a helicopter crash.
Beijing has piled navy, financial and diplomatic strain on Taiwan since President Tsai’s election in 2016, partly attributable to her refusal to acknowledge its stance that the island is a part of “one China”.
Under US President Donald Trump, Washington authorised some $18 billion value of arms gross sales to Taiwan, together with 66 new technology F16s and superior missile platforms — gross sales which have angered Beijing.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is printed from a syndicated feed.)
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