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.
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…
