In his opening remarks, Chairman Dr. Hwung-Hweng Hwung highlighted the significance of conducting an efficient rescue and salvage plan in “golden hours” during a sea crash event.  Although ASC had led two major sea crash investigations back in 2002, it is also important to realize that, without synchronizing available resources across the board from all involved countries into search and rescue activities, a single country cannot afford the huge amount of manpower and budget involved in a modern sea crash investigation anymore, based on what we learned from Malaysia Airlines flight 370 and Indonesia Air Asia flight 8501 investigations.  By holding this workshop, he expected that ASC will be able to elevate its own sea crash investigation capability as opinions from experts over the country join forces together in topics such as synchronizing resources and advancing flight recorder detection and salvage techniques.

Chairman Hwung further addressed that ASC signed a Memorandum of Understanding （MOU） with Chinese Ocean & Underwater Technology Association （COUTA） in the past April, in order to enhance domestic underwater occurrence investigation technology; in addition, this MOU has laid a foundation for future cooperation between academia and government agencies.  The workshop marked the first cooperation accomplishment between ASC and COUTA.  It is hoped that through information exchange, experience sharing, and expertise from COUTA specialists, ASC will benefit from all available techniques brought together by COUTA’s industries and academia partnerships, achieving a more efficient sea-crash investigation as an aim.           

The workshop featured not only presentations contributed by specialists from Office of Disaster Management, Executive Yuan, National Rescue Command Center, Executive Yuan, New Taipei City Rescue Association （NTCRA）, academia, and ASC, but also panel discussion in topics such as official reaction mechanism in case of sea crash, lessons learned from previous sea crash investigation, flight recorder underwater locating and recovery, and international case studies.  

Finally, Chairman Hwung would like to express his appreciation to COUTA, Office of Disaster Management, Executive Yuan, National Rescue Command Center, Executive Yuan, and all speakers and panelists, for their contribution to make this workshop possible.  He also would like to thank all distinguished guests for their participation, and hope that with everyone’s devotion, ASC will make progress toward a more efficient investigation.

Sherry Liu, Engineer
Tel: 89127388-330
Email: sherry@asc.gov.tw