TAIPEI: A Taiwanese military training aircraft crashed on Tuesday during a simulated engine failure exercise, killing the two pilots on board, the defense ministry said in a statement.<\/p>\n
The T-34 plane crashed at 8:08 a.m. (0008 GMT) at the northern end of the runway at Gangshan Air Base in the island\u2019s southern port city of Kaohsiung, the ministry said.<\/p>\n
The Air Force has set up a task force to investigate what caused the crash. The pilots have been identified only by their rank and surnames, Lt. Colonels Lu and Guo.<\/p>\n
President Lai Ching-te said he was \u201cdeeply saddened\u201d at the loss of life, describing the pilots as \u201cheroic\u201d and thanking them for their \u201csacrifice and dedication\u201d to Taiwan.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for the Air Force declined to provide further details when contacted by AFP.<\/p>\n
Taiwan\u2019s Air Force uses Beechcraft single-engine propeller planes as the primary trainer aircraft for its pilots, according to the defense ministry\u2019s website.<\/p>\n
The planes were first delivered to Taiwan in 1984.<\/p>\n
In January, a F-16 fighter jet crashed into the sea off eastern Taiwan during a routine training mission. The pilot is believed to have ejected from the aircraft but has not been found.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
TAIPEI: A Taiwanese military training aircraft crashed on Tuesday during a simulated engine failure exercise, killing the two pilots on board, the defense ministry said in a statement. The T-34 plane crashed at 8:08 a.m. (0008 GMT) at the northern end of the runway at Gangshan Air Base in the island\u2019s southern port city of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":98456,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-98440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98440"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98457,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98440\/revisions\/98457"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}