TAIPEI: Taiwan’s air force suspended flight training of new pilots on Tuesday after a jet trainer crashed killing its pilot, the defense ministry said, the second fatal accident the air force has experienced in 2022.
The ministry said the AT-3 jet crashed during a training mission from the Gangshan air base in the southern city of Kaohsiung and the body of the pilot had already been found.
The AT-3 is a domestically-developed advanced trainer that first flew in 1980 and can carry weapons.
Air force Chief of Staff Huang Chih-wei told reporters the aircraft had gone missing a few minutes after take-off, piloted by 23-year-old Hsu Ta-chun.
The aircraft was in good working order with no major maintenance issues reported over the past year, Huang added.
The air force has now suspended flight missions for its trainee pilots, he said.
President Tsai Ing-wen is “deeply saddened” by the loss and has instructed the Defense Ministry to investigate what happened, her office added in a statement.
In March, a Mirage 2000 fighter jet crashed into the sea off the island’s southeast coast, the second combat aircraft lost in three months. The pilot was rescued alive.
In January the air force suspended combat training for its F-16 fleet after a recently upgraded model of the fighter jet crashed into the sea, killing the pilot.
Last year, two F-5E fighters, which first entered service in Taiwan in the 1970s, crashed into the sea after they apparently collided in mid-air during a training mission.
In late 2020, an F-16 vanished shortly after taking off from the Hualien air base on Taiwan’s east coast on a routine training mission.
While Taiwan’s air force is well trained, it has been strained from repeatedly scrambling to see off Chinese military aircraft in the past two years, though the accidents have not been linked in any way to these intercept activities.
China, which claims the democratic island as its own, has been routinely sending aircraft into Taiwan’s air defense zone, mostly in an area around the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Islands but sometimes also into the airspace between Taiwan and the Philippines.
Taiwan air force suspends training after second fatal accident in 2022
https://arab.news/vd6e6
Taiwan air force suspends training after second fatal accident in 2022
- The AT-3 is a domestically-developed advanced trainer that first flew in 1980
Lawsuit challenges Trump administration’s ending of protections for Somalis
- The lawsuit cites a series of statements Trump has made describing Somalis as “garbage” and “low IQ people” who “contribute nothing.”
BOSTON: Immigrant rights advocates filed a lawsuit on Monday seeking to stop US President Donald Trump’s administration from next week ending legal protections that allow nearly 1,100 Somalis to live and work in the United States. The lawsuit, brought by four Somalis and two advocacy groups, challenges the US Department of Homeland Security’s decision to end Temporary Protected Status for Somali immigrants, whom Trump has derided in public remarks. Outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in January announced that TPS for Somalis would end on March 17, arguing that Somalia’s conditions had improved, despite fighting continuing between Somali forces and Al-Shabab militants. The plaintiffs, who include the groups African Communities Together and Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, in the lawsuit filed in Boston federal court argue the move was procedurally flawed and driven by a discriminatory, predetermined agenda.
The lawsuit cites a series of statements Trump has made describing Somalis as “garbage” and “low IQ people” who “contribute nothing.”
The plaintiffs said the administration is ending TPS for Somalia and other countries due to unconstitutional bias against non-white immigrants, not based on objective assessments of country conditions.
“The termination of TPS for Somalia is racism masking as immigration policy,” Omar Farah, executive director at the legal group Muslim Advocates, said in a statement.
DHS did not respond to a request for comment. It has previously said TPS was “never intended to be a de facto amnesty program.”
TPS is a form of humanitarian immigration protection that shields eligible migrants from deportation and allows them to work. Under Noem, DHS has moved to end TPS for a dozen countries, sparking legal challenges. The administration on Saturday announced plans to pursue an appeal at the US Supreme Court in order to end TPS for over 350,000 Haitians. It also wants the high court to allow it to end TPS for about 6,000 Syrians.
SOMALI COMMUNITY TARGETED
Somalia was first designated for TPS in 1991, with its latest extension in 2024. About 1,082 Somalis currently hold TPS, and 1,383 more have pending applications, according to DHS. Somalis in Minnesota in recent months had become a target of Trump’s immigration crackdown, with officials pointing to a fraud scandal in which many people charged come from the state’s large Somali community. The Trump administration cited those fraud allegations as a basis for a months-long immigration enforcement surge in Democratic-led Minnesota, during which about 3,000 immigration agents were deployed, spurring protests and leading to the killing of two US citizens by federal agents.
In November, Trump announced he would end TPS for Somalis in Minnesota, and a month later said he wanted them sent “back to where they came from.”
The US Department of State advises against traveling to Somalia, citing crime and civil unrest among numerous factors.
