Air Force to urge U.S. to speed up collision-avoidance system work following F-16V incident

Taipei, Jan. 7 (CNA) Taiwan's Air Force will urge the United States to expedite work to install automatic ground collision avoidance systems (Auto-GCAS) on its F-16V jets, with the aim of completing the process by the end of this year if possible, a military official said Wednesday after an F-16V jet went missing a day earlier.

Authorities have been searching for the missing F-16V aircraft and its pilot, Air Force Captain Hsin Po-yi (辛柏毅), following the incident on Tuesday.

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The incident has renewed public attention on Taiwan's plan to have Auto-GCAS installed on all of its F-16V aircraft, a project scheduled for completion in 2028.

Auto-GCAS uses data such as aircraft speed, heading and terrain to assess the risk of a ground or sea collision and alert the pilot. If the pilot does not respond, the system automatically adjusts the aircraft's attitude and altitude to prevent a crash.

Asked about the issue at a news conference on Wednesday, Air Force Inspector General Chiang Yi-cheng (江義誠) said the system is being jointly modified by relevant parties in Taiwan and the U.S. National Guard, which also operates F-16 jets.

"We will push the U.S. military to complete work on the systems as soon as possible," Chiang said. "We hope the work will proceed as planned, if not ahead of schedule, so that we can receive Auto-GCAS and related equipment by the end of the year."

During the Han Kuang military exercises on June 4, 2018, Air Force Major Wu Yen-ting (吳彥霆) was killed when the F-16 fighter jet he was piloting, tail number 6685, crashed into Wufen Mountain in Keelung County.

The Air Force subsequently announced that all F-16s would be fitted with Auto-GCAS.

Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲), a research fellow at the government-sponsored Institute for National Defense and Security Research, said Auto-GCAS is standard equipment on Taiwan's 66 newly purchased F-16V Block 70 jets.

However, he noted that integrating the system into the 139 remaining F-16V Block 20 aircraft upgraded under the Peace Phoenix Rising project is more complicated, as it involves rewiring, structural modifications to the airframe, and integration with existing fly-by-wire flight control systems.

Su said U.S. military experience shows Auto-GCAS has saved the lives of hundreds of pilots, making investment in collision-avoidance systems highly cost-effective.

In addition to accelerating installation, he suggested the Air Force could also follow U.S. practice by issuing pilots military-grade watches.

Such devices, he said, could provide GPS-based altitude and heading information, allowing basic flight control and landing in situations where cockpit instruments become unreadable due to incidents such as cabin depressurization or avionics failure.