Depreciation Before Destruction: How Taiwan's Air Force Is Being Worn Down in Peacetime

Since February 2025, three of Taiwan's aircraft fleets have been pulled off normal training after serious accidents.

The T-5 Brave Eagle crashed in February 2025 after a reported dual-engine failure at only 183 flight hours. The F-16V fleet was grounded in January 2026 after Captain Hsin Po-yi was lost during a night sortie off Hualien. In June 2026, the T-34C trainer fleet was suspended after two lieutenant colonels were killed in a training crash at Gangshan.

Taiwan ordered 66 F-16 Block 70s in 2019; the first two departed the United States in August 2026 but have still not reached Taiwan. The RF-5E reconnaissance fleet retired in July 2025; its first arriving MQ-9Bs reached Taiwan only in March 2026, and the MS-110 reconnaissance pods have only begun flight tests. The T-34C has served since 1984, lacks ejection seats, and until June's crash had no funded replacement.

Taiwan's Air Force is more capable than it was a decade ago. The harder question is whether it is consuming readiness faster than it can restore it. Whether the force can replace the flying hours, instructors and safety kits it is spending is a separate question from how many tails sit on the ramp.

Taiwan's 2025 National Defense Report calls for "multi-domain denial, resilient defense" while preserving combat power for the critical moment. An aircraft can remain on the inventory while its pilot is uncurrent, its safety system incomplete, or its airframe approaching the end of its useful life.

I. Inventory Is Not Availability

On paper, Taiwan has a substantial fighter fleet: 139 upgraded F-16Vs, roughly 55 Mirage 2000-5s, and about 126 Indigenous Defense Fighters. But inventory is not readiness. The Mirage fleet still depends on France for spare parts and has no confirmed retirement or upgrade path.

Peace Phoenix Rising was a major modernization effort. The programme delivered 139 aircraft, rather than the 144 contracted, after five airframes were lost during the upgrade period. F-16V serial 6700, which crashed off Hualien in January 2026, had logged 3,894 flight hours.

The 66 new Block 70s ordered in 2019 have yet to reach Taiwan. The first two aircraft, serial numbers 6727 and 6728, left the United States on August 17, but remain in Hawaii as of mid-September. On September 7, they aborted a departure from Hickam Field and returned to the apron for reasons that remain unclear.

Taiwan's Ministry of National Defence has sought compensation from Lockheed Martin over the delays. The remaining aircraft are expected to be completed by 2028.

The RF-5E retirement in July 2025 also left a capability gap that its successor has yet to close. The Mirage 2000-5 fleet faces its own constraints, including dependence on France for spare parts and no confirmed retirement or upgrade path.

Modernisation can therefore create temporary gaps of its own. Old platforms may leave service before replacements become fully operational.

II. Four Mechanisms of Readiness Erosion

Operational attrition

On January 6, 2026, F-16V serial 6700 took off from Hualien. An hour or so later, the aircraft fell from 7,600 to 1,700 feet in under two minutes. Captain Hsin Po-yi called out that he was preparing to eject three times. He was not recovered.

Recovering the wreckage required deep-sea salvage capability Taiwan did not possess. Hsin had logged 611 flight hours, including 371 on the F-16. Press coverage noted at the time that Taiwan's F-16Vs lacked Auto-GCAS. The ROC military has lost 20 personnel in aviation incidents since 2020; eleven F-16s have been lost since 1997.

None of these figures proves what caused the January crash. An accident can remove a pilot, an airframe, flight hours and maintenance capacity. If the pilot is an experienced instructor, the loss can take years to replace. 

In July 2026 the Control Yuan issued corrective measures against the Air Force over the Hualien accident, citing gaps in risk management and maintenance records, including navigation-system faults in the week before the flight.

Production disruption

The T-5 Brave Eagle was designed in part to reduce dependence on foreign suppliers. Its February 2025 crash after a reported dual-engine failure at 183 flight hours showed that indigenous production does not eliminate reliability, integration or sustainment risks. 

The program recovered, with 56 aircraft delivered by May 2026, but the disruption still exposed a basic limit. Indigenous production can reduce dependence on foreign suppliers while creating new demands on domestic production and sustainment. 

Deferred safety investment

Taiwan identified the Auto-GCAS requirement after the 2018 Han Kuang crash that killed Major Wu Yen-ting. In May 2026, Air Force Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Lee Ching-jan announced that software updates would begin in July, hardware upgrades from September, and full fleet coverage by the end of 2028. That is roughly a decade between identifying the requirement and completing the upgrade. 

New Block 70s will arrive with the system installed. The 139 upgraded Block 20 airframes will not, until the analog flight-control work is finished.

The January 2026 crash does not prove that Auto-GCAS would have prevented the accident. The more important point is that a safety measure identified years earlier was still not fully deployed across the fleet.

Pipeline senescence

The T-34C entered service in 1984, lacks ejection seats, and had no funded replacement pathway. On June 2, Lieutenant Colonels Lu Chi-yu and Kuo Chun-nan were killed during a simulated engine-failure exercise at Gangshan. Both had more than 2,000 flight hours on the type.

The Ministry of National Defence later accelerated a replacement feasibility study, with Defence Minister Wellington Koo discussing a domestically produced successor targeted for introduction from 2028. 

An aircraft can be ordered; an instructor with thousands of hours of experience cannot be. Losing senior instructors reduces the pool available to train the next generation of pilots just as operational demands are rising.

III. The Cost of Peacetime

The PLA flew 3,764 sorties into Taiwan's ADIZ in 2025, 22.4 percent above the previous year's record. The Institute for the Study of War recorded 125 ADIZ incursions in August 2026 alone, while 21 PLA aircraft crossed the median line on September 6.

For Taiwan, the cost is cumulative. Airframes accumulate flight hours. Maintenance crews work more often. Pilots must stay current. Instructors spend time training replacements rather than preparing for combat. Every sortie adds to the workload needed to keep the force ready.

In May 2026, a PLAAF YY-20 tanker refuelled J-16 fighters inside Taiwan's ADIZ during a 60-aircraft, three-day operation. Aerial refuelling extends patrol endurance, allowing PLA aircraft to remain in the area longer and increasing the demands on Taiwan's response force.

Since June 2026, the China Coast Guard has maintained a continuous presence east of Taiwan, rotating task groups to signal permanence. 

During operations, CCG vessels have radioed commercial ships to verify crew and destination. Ryan Martinson of the Naval War College's China Maritime Studies Institute describes the normalised patrol as positioning Beijing for a more rapid transition to quarantine operations; Gregory Poling of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative told AFP that China is "claiming vast law enforcement rights" that go beyond international law. 

The Block 70s are to be based at Chihang Air Base on Taiwan's eastern coast, the same coastline now under continuous CCG observation.

The broader asymmetry is simple. China can rotate a much larger force through the theatre. Taiwan must preserve a much smaller force while responding to the same pressure repeatedly.

The result is a slow drain on readiness. Aircraft fly more. Maintenance comes sooner. Pilots and instructors have to stay current. Replacements take time. None of this looks like destruction, but it reduces the margin available when a real crisis begins.

IV. The Procurement Gap

The AGM-154C JSOW was notified to Congress in 2017, but its production contract was not signed until 2024. Three NASAMS fire units were contracted in late 2025, with completion projected for 2031. By April 2026, Taiwan's outstanding US arms backlog stood at nearly US$30 billion.

The backlog does not mean all of this capability is unusable. Some systems replace existing equipment; others add new capability. The bigger problem is the time between identifying a need and having a system Taiwan can actually operate.

A proposed US$14 billion package for advanced air and missile defence was paused in mid-2026. Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao told a Senate appropriations hearing that Washington was conserving munitions depleted by its campaign against Iran. 

"Right now, we're doing a pause in order to make sure we have the munitions we need for Epic Fury," Cao said, adding that foreign military sales would resume "when the administration deems necessary."

Analysts disagree over how much of the delay reflects US stockpile pressure and how much reflects Trump-Xi diplomacy. Taiwan's defence ministry said it had not received formal notification of a pause. The uncertainty matters either way. Taiwan cannot assume that an approved system will arrive on the timetable its planners expect.

The NT$780 billion special procurement package passed by the Legislative Yuan in May 2026 can provide funding, but funding is only the start. Letters of Offer and Acceptance, initial payments, production, delivery and training still have to follow. That is Taiwan's time-to-capability problem. The procurement clock does not stop when a budget is approved.

V. The Training Gap

Taiwan does not publicly disclose aggregate annual pilot flight hours. Without that data, the legislature and public cannot tell whether defence spending is producing enough flight time to maintain proficiency.

Open-source assessments estimate that front-line PLAAF pilots now fly about 150 to 200 hours a year, up from roughly 120 a decade ago. China has also shortened parts of its fighter-pilot training pipeline through the supersonic JL-10. These figures should be treated cautiously because Taiwan does not publish comparable data and Chinese estimates cannot be independently verified.

The bigger problem is domestic accountability. Secrecy may protect sensitive readiness information, but it also leaves the public unable to answer a basic question: are Taiwan's pilots flying enough to remain proficient for the missions they may have to perform?

Aircraft numbers alone cannot answer that. Readiness also depends on enough pilots, instructors, flight hours and maintenance capacity to turn aircraft on paper into usable combat power.

VI. The Readiness Ledger

The table below runs two ledgers side by side: what Taiwan has decided to acquire, and what remains unavailable while the acquisition, upgrade or replacement works its way through the system.

The ledger therefore measures something conventional procurement announcements often obscure: not simply what Taiwan has bought, but how long it takes before the purchase becomes usable capability.

VII. What Taiwan Should Measure

The 2018 Auto-GCAS requirement moved only after the 2026 accident made the gap public again. That question should apply across the entire ledger. How long does Taiwan take to close a known readiness gap, and does the capability arrive before the next incident exposes it?

The Legislative Yuan passed a NT$240 billion drone-spending act on August 27, 2026, reflecting the ODC's logic of preserving manned aircraft for the contested phase. The legislature rejected the government's competing NT$210 billion proposal. The new act sets a NT$40 billion annual spending ceiling, while the defence ministry projected NT$42.1 billion in drone spending for 2027 alone. Budget authority is not drone capacity. 

The act also addresses primarily the air and surface unmanned domain; the CCG's normalised patrol east of Taiwan has added a maritime grey-zone dimension that unmanned systems designed for strait-crossing scenarios may not fully cover.

The Stimson Center's March 2026 report "Runway Trap" argues that Chinese missiles could crater Taiwan's operational runways within hours of a conflict. That highlights the limits of judging defence preparedness through procurement alone. 

Spending is easy to count. The readiness it produces is harder to see.

Publishing aggregate pilot flight hours and fleet availability figures alongside procurement announcements would give the legislature and public a clearer picture of whether readiness is actually improving.

The goal is not a perfect readiness score. It is to show how long Taiwan takes to turn a recognised requirement into usable capability.

Deterrence built on an honest ledger is more durable than deterrence built on an optimistic one.

Meng Kit Tang

Meng Kit Tang is a Singaporean freelance analyst and commentator who works as an aerospace engineer. He graduated from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), NTU, Singapore in 2025. His research interests include cross-Strait relations, Taiwan politics and policy issues, and aerospace technology.

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