By Andrew Greene, Defence Correspondent for ABC
The government says it's yet to receive a satisfactory response from Beijing. Photo: ABC News: Christopher Gillette
- Airservices Australia has detailed how a Virgin Australia pilot first alerted the danger of Chinese live-fire exercises in the Tasman Sea on Friday morning.
- Officials have told the Australian parliament 49 flights had to be diverted on Friday, as well as more flights over the weekend.
- What's next?: The Australian government says it is yet to receive a satisfactory response from Beijing about the inadequate notice given about the military drills.
Aviation officials have revealed they first learnt of a potential Chinese "live fire" military exercise in the Tasman Sea last week after a Virgin Airlines pilot relayed warnings he had picked up mid-flight via an emergency radio frequency.
Airservices Australia representatives told an Australian parliamentary hearing that almost 50 flights were forced to divert on Friday after the People's Liberation Army-Navy (PLA-N) signalled it was conducting the hazardous drills in busy international airspace.
Under questioning from opposition senators, Airservices Australia chief executive Rob Sharp confirmed the government-owned organisation responsible for managing air traffic became aware of the danger to aircraft at 9:58am on Friday, Canberra time.
"It was in fact a Virgin Australia aircraft that advised one of our air traffic controllers that a foreign warship was broadcasting that they were conducting live firing 300 nautical miles east off our coast," Sharp said.
The Jiangkai-class frigate Hengyang was among the Chinese flotilla sailing east of Sydney. Photo: ABC / Department of Defence
"At 10am our air traffic control commenced what we call a 'hazard alert' which basically alerts all flights in the area that there's a hazard, so that was done within 2 minutes."
Deputy Airservices Australia chief executive Peter Curran explained to the committee that the Virgin pilot monitored radio transmissions direct from one of the Chinese warships via an 'international guard frequency', which is not monitored by air traffic controllers.
"We can't hear what was said, so the pilot of the Virgin aircraft heard what was said from the Chinese vessel, relayed that back to air traffic control [who] then passed that through our system and started giving hazard alerting to all aircraft on the frequency," Curran said.
"Just after 10am our national operations centre contacted Defence Joint Operations Command and advised of the situation, bearing in mind at that stage we didn't know whether it was a potential hoax or real, we simply passed the information through."
Curran also confirmed an ABC news report on Friday that New Zealand-bound Emirates flight UAE3HJ was then directly warned by the Chinese warships about the live firing exercises, at about 10:18am.
An Emirates flight from Sydney to Christchurch was directly warned by the Chinese military to avoid airspace on Friday morning, before Chinese vessels were believed to have conducted live fire exercises.
"An Emirates flight was also in contact with the warships, and which was advised that they were conducting live firing between 0930 and 14:00 [local time]," Curran told the estimates hearing.
"[On] Friday some 49 aircraft in total diverted, some of that was the aircraft that was in the air at the time that we first became aware of it, many of them were flights afterwards, subsequently flight planned to simply reroute around the airspace."
Officials say trans-Tasman flight plans had to be diverted throughout the weekend as "a matter of precaution", with the measures finally lifted on Monday morning once the PLA-N taskforce had moved further south away from international airways.
Last week Defence Minister Richard Marles said Beijing had failed to give satisfactory reasons for what he called the inadequate notice of Friday's live-fire drill, telling ABC Radio Perth, "we became aware of the issue during the course of the day".
- This story was first published by ABC
