Exclusive: Chinese jet fires flare near submarine search helicopter in South China Sea, Canadian Navy says

Aboard HMCS Ottawa
CNN
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Last Sunday, Chinese military jets fired flares at a Canadian military helicopter in international waters in the South China Sea, but Canadian military officials said the operation was reckless and could lead to the plane being shot down.

Lieutenant Commander Rob Millen, a flight officer on the Royal Canadian Navy frigate HMCS, said: “The risk to the helicopter in this case is that the flare will enter the rotor or the engine, so this is unsafe, non-standard and unprofessional.” It was classified as such.” Ottawa, a warship on which a Sikorsky Cyclone helicopter was flying.

The incident was the second of two encounters between an Ottawa helicopter and a People’s Liberation Army Navy J-11 fighter jet in international waters on Oct. 29, when the fighter jet came within 100 feet of the helicopter, Millen said. said in an interview with CNN. Aboard a warship.

He said Chinese aircraft have been repeatedly seen approaching fixed-wing aircraft in Canada and other countries, but such action against helicopters is unusual.

The first incident occurred in international waters 54 miles outside the Paracel Islands in the northern South China Sea. The second flight was also over high seas, 37 miles outside the Paracel Islands. The warship was operating in international waters 100 miles (160 kilometers) east of the Paracel Islands at the time.

Ottawa’s crew said Canadian helicopters were searching for a previously spotted submarine at the time of the incident.

Millen was piloting a Canadian helicopter earlier in the day when a Chinese J-11 intercepted it at close range as the plane was flying straight, level, 3,000 feet above the water toward Ottawa. He said it showed there was no animosity.

In a previous encounter, Millen said Chinese fighter jets circled and flew around his helicopter.

“At some point it became unsafe as the interceptor aircraft came closer and closer,” he said.

Millen said his helicopter encountered turbulence from Chinese military aircraft, which also posed a danger to the helicopter.

“I’m certainly not as comfortable as you might think given the vulnerability of the rotor system,” he said.

Millen said the encounter ended by descending to an altitude of 200 feet, which is possible for a helicopter to fly but “very uncomfortable for a fast fighter.”

Royal Canadian Air Force Major said his military’s air crews are training how to respond to interceptions like the one that occurred on Sunday and will continue to fly over the high seas of the South China Sea.

CNN has reached out to Chinese authorities for comment on recent incidents.

China Claiming historical jurisdiction over almost the entire vast South China Sea, And since 2014, it has built small reefs and sandbars into artificial islands and heavily fortified them with missiles, airstrips and weapons systems, sparking protests from other claimants. The Paracel Islands, which China calls the Paracel Islands, are located in the northern South China Sea, east of Da Nang, Vietnam, and south of China’s Hainan Island.

This 1.3 million square mile waterway is critical to international trade, with an estimated one-third of the world’s shipping traffic worth trillions of dollars passing through it each year. It also has vast fertile fishing grounds on which many lives and livelihoods depend.

In 2016, international tribunal The Hague concluded that China has no legal basis to claim historical rights to large parts of the South China Sea. China ignored this ruling.

Major Western powers frequently make crossings to claim the area as international waters, infuriating Beijing.

Ottawa has been patrolling the waterway since last Monday, sometimes working with naval ships and aircraft from the United States, Australia, Japan and New Zealand in a multinational exercise called Noble Caribou. However, she was operating alone when she encountered the Chinese plane.

The Ottawa and the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Rafael Peralta continued their deployment into the Taiwan Strait, another tense international waterway and critical shipping lane, overnight from Wednesday to Thursday local time.
Encounter between the People’s Liberation Army and allied ships.

Last June, the U.S. Navy reported that the destroyer Chung Hung had a close encounter with a Chinese warship while passing through the Taiwan Strait, and the U.S. warship slowed down to avoid a collision with the Chinese navy vessel that cut in front of it. The Canadian frigate HMCS Montreal was accompanying the American ship at the time, and a news crew aboard the ship recorded the incident.

In response to questions from reporters at a national defense conference in Singapore, then-Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu accused the United States of gradually escalating tensions in the region.

“They’re not here for an innocent voyage, they’re here for a provocation,” Lee said of the U.S. warships.

Li said the United States and other foreign powers should not send military assets near China if they do not want a confrontation.

“Mind your own business,” Lee said, adding, “Why did all these incidents happen in nearby areas of China and not in nearby areas of other countries?”

However, this week’s passage of allied warships through the strait was uneventful, with no reports of contact.

Sunday’s incident followed other reports of dangerous interceptions of allied aircraft in recent days.

The U.S. military said Tuesday that a People’s Liberation Army fighter jet came within 10 feet of a U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber flying over the South China Sea.

And in early October, Chinese fighter jets came within 5 meters (16 feet) of a Canadian CP-140 reconnaissance and surveillance aircraft over the East China Sea.

The incident was recorded by reporters on board the Canadian Aircraft and was also witnessed by Major General Ian Huddleston, Commander of the 1st Canadian Air Division, who was also on board the aircraft.

Huddleston, who was on the plane, called the interception “unprofessional” and “very offensive” in a report on Radio-Canada.

“The Canadian aircraft was subjected to multiple close maneuvers by People’s Liberation Army Air Force aircraft, putting the safety of all personnel at risk,” the Canadian Defense Ministry said in a statement.

China’s Foreign Ministry said the Canadian plane had illegally entered Chinese airspace and accused the Canadian military of “sending fighter jets to the other side of the world to cause trouble and provoke China right in front of them.”

In an incident witnessed by a CNN crew in February, a Chinese fighter jet came within 500 feet of a U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane flying at 21,500 feet, about 30 miles above the Paracel Islands.

Earlier this month, Eli Ratner, the top Pentagon official responsible for security in the Indo-Pacific region, said there were increasing instances of “coercive and dangerous” behavior in the United States. chinese pilot There have been more attacks on U.S. aircraft in the East and South China Seas in the past two years than in the entire previous decade.

“Since the fall of 2021, there have been more than 180 such incidents,” Ratner said. “This is an intensive and coordinated campaign to carry out these dangerous acts to force changes in America’s legitimate operations.”