Ramping up the rhetoric…

Well, the ROKs have jumped into the ADIZ game…

SEOUL, South Korea — Defying both China and Japan, South Korea announced on Sunday that it was expanding its air patrol zone for the first time in 62 years to include airspace over the East China Sea that is also claimed by Beijing and Tokyo.

Full article HERE.

senkaku map

This is getting serious, and pushing closer and closer to a shoot down…

For those that may not be familiar with what an ADIZ consist of, here’s a quick primer.

An Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) is airspace over land or water in which the identification, location, and control of civil aircraft is required in the interest of national security. They extend beyond a country’s airspace to give the country more time to respond to foreign and possibly hostile aircraft. The authority to establish an ADIZ is not given by any international treaty nor prohibited by international law and is not regulated by any international body.  There are normally three parts to this-  A flight plan giving time and detailed route to/through the ADIZ; radio authentication/verification including responding to queries from air traffic control and obeying instructions of air traffic control; and transponder operation on assigned modes/codes as directed.

Dating to WWII, these are taken SERIOUSLY by all countries including armed response by fighter/interceptor aircraft and pre-emptive (e.g. weapons free) approval based on certain circumstances (remember KAL 007).

Having operated in that part of the world, I know how quickly things ‘can’ spin out of control…  Remember, blind obedience to authority IS the standard over there…

We know the Chinese have some ‘cowboy’ pilots, as evidenced by the PR32 ‘incident’ and they aren’t the only ones…

The ROKs have a wartime mentality in their government/military structure for good reason, there are constant probes by DPRK and others; so the ROKs do NOT play games. Their approach is sink it/shoot it, THEN figure out if was unfriendly or now (what we used to call the ‘flaming datum’ mentality).

Now let me give you a situation…

John Q airliner is happily bebopping along at FL360, having been told by his government to ‘ignore’ those pesky ADIZ and only comply with the ‘standard’ ones that have been in place for years…  It’s IFR, cloudy as hell at altitude and they are in/out of the layers.  They’ve filled a generic flight plan route from point A to point B, and ‘should’ miss the new ADIZ (just to be on the safe side).

But… They have to divert to try to get some smooth air, so they turn slightly off course and climb an extra 3,000 feet (light load of gas now).  Their transponder is intermittent and they figure they will get back on track at Kaohsiung.  They’re talking to Tokyo Flight Information Region (FIR) controllers, and trying their damnest to ‘hear’ and understand them due to the static on the radio.  So they don’t hear the Chinese controllers call them multiple times…

The Chinese launch the ready fighters and they haul to the intercept position based on Ground Controlled Intercept (GCI) controllers.  Since the pilots have no idea who’s up there, and not really trusting the GCI controllers to get them real close without causing an aluminum shower, they close to within a mile or two before they really start looking out the windscreen.  But they aren’t seeing a lot…

At this point they would split out into tactical spread, bring up the pulse doppler radar (about 40km range), and try to close the target.   They might or might not actually see the target; and GCI would be pushing them for an ID…

Military flights typically don’t respond to radio calls from the Chinese, and if the pilots only get a radar contact/shadow sighting, well, it’s not ‘on’ an accepted flight plan (remember the deviation above) so it’s a military flight being conducted ‘illegally’ within their ADIZ, so shoot it down…

Or they do close and see it’s an airliner, and decide to ‘bounce’ the airliner by coming up in front of them at near supersonic speeds and make the airliner fly through the vortex they generate…

Except they are a little too close…

In either case you have an airliner crashed, hundreds dead,  an international incident and then the finger pointing starts…

Which doesn’t do a helluva lot of good for those who died…

I will be surprised if there is not a serious international incident in the next 90 days over this…

Comments

Ramping up the rhetoric… — 22 Comments

  1. Hey Old NFO

    You are correct, that is what happened to KAL 007 in 1983 and we had Reagan in the white house. Now we have Obungler in the white house and his foreign policy is the equivalent to the Keystone Kops. I can see him throwing our allies or a commercial airplane under the proverbial bus like his new nuke deal with Iran. The Russians tried to blame the U.S. for the shootdown and I remembered the media started to carry thier water in this until the Americans released the intercepts and proved that the soviets under the command of their Far East SVO air defence command ordered the shootdown. Granted the Korean pilots were trying to shave some time on the flight. Now the Chinese are feeling frisky, the Japanese, Koreans and the R.O.C.are feeling left in the cold. I believe that they have no faith in Obama to hold to his treaty commitments.

  2. There was a time when the US took a lead in arbitrating disputes and if necessary, exercised gunboat diplomacy to keep the lid on these situations. Sadly with a post-American commander in chief, that’s not going to happen.

    • Additionally the area now claimed by the ROK has a ROK platform on the tidal island (sitting atop oil/gas). The Chinese dispute that claim.

  3. Bob- Yep, I know a good bit about both of them…

    LL- Right on both counts… dammit…

  4. I can see this going south real bad real soon. But everything has gone so far south everywhere else I’m not sure anybody will even pay attention. It’ll be just par for the course.

  5. Opus- I do too…

    WSF- And I really don’t want to be there again…

    PH- You’re right… As long as it’s far away, only kills military, nobody cares…

    CP- Yep…

    Rev- True

    Tim- We can’t, THAT is the problem!

  6. Now, now. I’m sure a downed jetliner will result in a VERY STERNLY WORDED letter to Peking from Obama and SecState Kerry.

  7. Why doesn’t anyone try to make sure the weather stays nice? Problem solved, everybody happy. Sounds like this might actually be the easiest solution…
    And yes, I keep my fingers crossed that it doesn’t happen as you described, have some dear people flying in that neighbourhood now and then, if only as passengers, they still remain precious to me (but at least, they will never take the blame for anything going wrong…)

  8. This is not going to end well. Of course, if our current management in Washington (I refuse to say leadership) had any brains and/or guts, they’d be parking a carrier task force smack dab in the middle of it all and daring China to do something about it.

    Nip this kind of crap in the bud, and in 20 years we’ll be wondering what all the fuss was about.

  9. Jade- Weather is unpredictable at best over there…

    DB- Yep, ‘if’ we had a carrier to actually PUT down there… dammit…

    • I was trying to be funny – even though it seems that the weather is the only thing that is normally unpredictable, the rest is just as unpredictable, but it shouldn’t be
      Can we also ask if there is going to be any more Grey Man? I’m so ready to read more – would be a nice christmas occupation…

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