A Chinese warplane fired flares in front of a Canadian military helicopter over international waters of the South China Sea last Sunday, an operation that Canadian military officers said was reckless and could have resulted in the downing of the aircraft.
“The risk to a helicopter in that instance is the flares moving into the rotor blades or the engines so this was categorized as both unsafe and non-standard, unprofessional,” said Maj. Rob Millen, air officer aboard the Royal Canadian Navy frigate HMCS Ottawa,
the warship from which the Sikorsky Cyclone helicopter was flying.The incident was the second of two encounters
the Ottawa’s helicopter had with Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy J-11
fighter jets over international waters on October 29, which saw the fighters
get as close as 100 feet from the helicopter, Millen told CNN in an interview
aboard the warship.
He said that Canada and other nations have
seen Chinese aircraft get close to fixed-wing aircraft on numerous occasions,
but it was rare to see such action taken against a helicopter.
The first incident was over international
waters outside of 34 miles from the Paracel Island chain in the northern part
of the South China Sea. The second was also over international waters outside
of 23 miles from the Paracels. The warship was operating in international
waters 100 miles (160 kilometers) east of the Paracels at the time.
The Canadian helicopter was searching for a
previously detected submarine when the incidents occurred, officers aboard the
Ottawa said.
Millen said he was piloting
the Canadian helicopter earlier in the day, when Chinese J-11s intercepted it
at close range while it flew straight and level at 3,000 feet above the water
back toward the Ottawa, a signal to that it had no hostile intent.
In that earlier encounter, Millen said the Chinese fighters flew in circles around his helicopter.
“When the intercepting aircraft was closer and
closer, at a certain point it became unsafe,” he said.
His helicopter experienced turbulence coming
off the Chinese jets, also posing a danger to the copter, Millen said.
“I certainly am not as comfortable as you can
be based on the fragility of the rotor system,” he said.
Millen
said he ended that encounter by descending to 200 feet, an area where the
helicopter can operate but is “very uncomfortable for fast air fighter jets.”
The
Canadian air force major said his military’s air crews train on how to respond
to such intercepts as occurred on Sunday and will continue to fly over the
international waters of the South China Sea.
Asked
about the interception at a regular press briefing on Friday, Chinese foreign
ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin replied: “I’m not aware of the situation you
mentioned.”
“We
have reiterated many times our firm position on Canadian warplanes conducting
reconnaissance near China’s territorial airspace,” he told reporters. “We hope
Canada will refrain from its inappropriate behavior to avoid the situation from
becoming more complicated.”
CNN
has also reached to China’s Defense Ministry for comment.
China claims
historic jurisdiction over almost the entirety of the vast South China Sea, and
since 2014 has built up tiny reefs and sandbars into artificial islands heavily
fortified with missiles, runways and weapons systems – sparking outcry from the
other claimants. The Paracels, called the Xisha Islands by China, are in the
northern part of the South China Sea, east of Da Nang, Vietnam, and south of
China’s Hainan Island.
The
1.3-million-square-mile waterway is vital to international trade, with an
estimated third of global shipping worth trillions of dollars passing through
each year. It’s also home to vast fertile fishing grounds upon which many lives
and livelihoods depend.
In 2016, an international tribunal in The Hague
concluded that China has no legal basis to claim historic rights to the bulk of
the South China Sea. China has ignored the ruling.
Major western powers frequently conduct passage across the sea in order to
assert that the region is international waters, sparking Beijing’s ire.
The Ottawa had
been patrolling the waterway since last Monday, at times operating with United
States, Australian, Japanese and New Zealand naval vessels and aircraft in a
multinational exercise dubbed Noble Caribou. However, it was operating alone
when the encounters with the Chinese jets.
The Ottawa and the
US Navy destroyer USS Rafael Peralta overnight Wednesday into Thursday local
time continued their deployment into the Taiwan Strait,
another international waterway and vital shipping
channel that has seen tense
encounters between PLA and allied vessels.
Last June, the US
Navy reported a close encounter between the destroyer USS Chung-Hoon and a
Chinese warship during a Taiwan Strait transit, in which the US warship slowed
down to avoid colliding with the Chinese navy vessel that cut in front of
it. The Canadian frigate HMCS Montreal was accompanying the US ship at the
time, and a news crew aboard it recorded the incident.
Then Chinese
Defense Minister Li Shangfu blamed the US for ratcheting up tensions in the
region when questioned by reporters at a defense conference in Singapore.
“They are not here
for innocent passage, they are here for provocation,” Li said of US warships.
Li said if the US
and other foreign powers did not want confrontation, they should not send their
military assets near China.
“Mind your own
business,” Li said, adding, “Why did all these incidents happen in areas near
China, not in areas near other countries?”
This week’s
passage of the allied warships through the strait was uneventful, however, with
no contact reported.
Sunday’s incidents
come after other reports of unsafe intercepts of allied aircraft in the recent
days.
On Tuesday, a PLA
fighter jet came within 10 feet of a US Air Force B-52 bomber flying over the
South China Sea, the US military said.
And earlier in
October, a Chinese fighter jet came within five meters (16 feet) of a Canadian
CP-140 reconnaissance and surveillance plane over the East China Sea.
That incident was
recorded by news crews aboard the Canadian aircraft and witnessed by Maj.
Gen. Iain Huddleston, the commander of Canada’s 1st Air Division, who was
also on the plane.
Huddleston called
the intercept “unprofessional” and “very aggressive” in a report from Radio
Canada, which was on the plane.
“The Canadian
aircraft was subject to multiple close-proximity manoeuvres by a PLAAF aircraft
that put the safety of all personnel at risk,” Canada’s Defense Ministry said
in a statement.
China’s Foreign
Ministry said the Canadian plane illegally entered Chinese airspace and accused
the Canadian military of sending “warplanes halfway around the world to stir up
trouble and make provocations at China’s doorsteps.”
In February, in an
incident witnessed by a CNN crew, a Chinese fighter jet came within 500 feet of
a US Navy reconnaissance plane flying at 21,500 feet about 30 miles from the
Paracels.
Earlier this
month, the Pentagon’s top official in charge of security in the Indo-Pacific,
Ely Ratner, said that the US has seen more instances of “coercive and
risky” behavior from Chinese pilots against US aircraft in
the last two years over the East and South China Seas than in the entire decade
before that.
“Since the fall of
2021, we have seen more than 180 such incidents,” Ratner said. “It’s a
centralized and concerted campaign to perform these risky behaviors in order to
coerce a change in lawful US operational activity.”
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