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| RAAF AP-3C Orion (Image: Wiki Commons) |
By Shannon Tiezzi
An accidental scoop by a BBC reporter suggests so.
On December 14, the BBC ran a story chronicling reporter Rupert Wingfield-Hayes’ attempt to fly near some of China’s artificial islands in a Cessna. The piece is fascinating in its own right – not least for its implication that Wingfield-Hayes was basically conducting his own mini-freedom of navigation operation. When Chinese radio broadcasts warn the aircraft away, Wingfield-Hayes convinces his pilots to ignore the warnings: “We are not breaking any laws, the Chinese are not going to shoot us down. You must hold your course, and you must respond to them and tell them we are a civilian aircraft flying in international airspace.”
But toward the end of the piece is an inadvertent scoop by Wingfield-Hayes. While flying over the South China Sea, his plane’s radio picks up a broadcast from another source:
China Navy, China Navy. We are an Australian aircraft exercising international freedom of navigation rights, in international airspace in accordance with the international civil aviation convention, and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea – over.
Though Wingfield-Hayes says his aircraft was warned away repeatedly (and aggressively) by the Chinese navy, he didn’t catch any Chinese response to the Australian broadcast. Details released later provided a specific date for the radio transmission (November 25) and identified the aircraft as an RAAF AP-3C Orion.
Read the full story at The Diplomat