A controversy about who’s in charge of packing parachutes for the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) has been killed off by the military themselves after days of online discourse.
It all started when a Leslie Ang put up a post on his Facebook page claiming that the job of parachute-packing has been outsourced to contractors from China, citing worries about safety.
“Openly, our airborne capabilities like parachute model, jumping height, etc are made known to foreign contractors”, he wrote. “We are, literally, placing our lifes in foreign contractors’ hands when we leap from the plane?”
I’d painfully struggled for 2 days, weighing the pros and cons before I made a decision to pen this post. Learnt from…
Posted by Leslie Ang on Sunday, 10 January 2016
Most disagreed with him, claiming that he shouldn’t be accusing the SAF of anything without backing up his claims. A particularly impassioned open letter was written by former SAF commando Brandon Lee:
It appears that I cannot comment on his page. Thus, I have to write this post on my own wall. I hope that somehow this…
Posted by Brandon Lee on Tuesday, 12 January 2016
Seeing that the online chatter didn’t seem like it was going away anytime soon, SAF had to issue their own statement on The Singapore Army Facebook page. Chief Commando Officer Colonel Simon Lim assured the public that the parachute-packing function is actually outsourced to local company Singapore Technologies — not to some company in China. In fact, the parachute-packing staff themselves are former Riggers, all well-trained, competent and certified to do so.
Some of you may have seen online speculation about the packing of the SAF parachute. Here’s what Chief Commando Officer,…
Posted by The Singapore Army on Tuesday, 12 January 2016
To further drive away any remaining shadows of speculations, they uploaded a whole photo album about the packing process, and how the SAF Riggers ensure no errors at all at their facility.
Ever wonder why the elite Commandos have full confidence in our SAF Riggers?”There’s no room for error…Their lives…
Posted by The Singapore Army on Tuesday, 12 January 2016
