Taipei, Nov. 24 (CNA) The Ministry of National Defense (MND) has been censured over a training mishap last year involving an E-2K airborne early warning (AEW) aircraft that skidded off the runway after its landing gear was not deployed due to pilot error, the Control Yuan said Friday.
A motion was approved to reprimand the MND Thursday after an investigation into the case concluded, the Control Yuan, which is responsible for investigating and censuring illegal or negligent acts by public servants or agencies, said in a news release.
According to the Air Force Command Headquarters, the incident happened when a serial No. 2503 AEW aircraft skidded off the runway while landing at Pingtung County airbase on Nov. 25, 2022. No one was injured, but the poor maneuver left the plane seriously damaged.
Members of the Control Yuan’s Committee on Foreign and National Defense Affairs Pu Chung-cheng (浦忠成), Lai Ting-ming (賴鼎銘) and Hsiao Tzu-yu (蕭自佑) said in the press statement that the two trainee pilots had failed to carry out proper pre-landing checks as they approached the runway.
This major oversight included not making sure the landing gear was down, even though the co-pilot had called for a “gear check” during a traffic call, the committee members said.
Another mistake was that during the plane’s descent, the instructor, who was also in the cabin, had intentionally switched off the landing gear warning as part of the training, but this resulted in the two pilots becoming preoccupied with other tasks and not paying the landing gear enough attention, they said.
The third oversight was that ground operations supervisors failed to notice in time that the E-2K’s landing gear had not been deployed as the plane approached the runway.
The committee members said the case caught their attention because a similar incident had happened in 1997 that also involved an Air Force E-2 Hawkeye (E-2T variant) being damaged after pilots failed to deploy the landing gear.
Citing the TransAsia Airways Flight 235 crash in 2015 that occurred due to pilot error, they said flight safety was in question if pilots were unable to respond to emergencies, and demanded that the Air Force make improvements to their training to prevent similar incidents from happening again.
