Prime Minister Anthony Albanese denounced the move as “completely unacceptable” after Australia accused a Chinese fighter plane of shooting flares into the path of a navy helicopter last weekend over international waters in the Yellow Sea.
The Defence Ministry in Canberra stated that the Australian MH-60R Seahawk helicopter was on patrol implementing UN sanctions against North Korea at the time of the incident, adding that the action put the crew’s life in jeopardy.
“This was an unsafe maneuver which posed a risk to the aircraft and personnel,” the statement from Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles said.The Chinese jet “dropped flares about 300 meters (984 feet) in front of the Seahawk helicopter and about 60 meters (197 feet) above it,” Marles said in an interview with 9 News on Monday.
No damage or injuries were reported, but flares can lead to the downing of a helicopter if they strike and damage its rotor blades, or if they are ingested into its engines.The incident is the latest in a growing list of confrontations in international waters between China’s military and other nations, and it comes as Canberra and Beijing are pursuing a rapprochement following a bruising few years of trade disputes and strained relations.
The MH-60 Seahawk is a twin-engine helicopter and carries a crew of three, according to the Australian Navy.The Australian helicopter was operating from the destroyer HMAS Hobart in international waters of the Yellow Sea as part of Operation Argos, Canberra’s contribution to a multinational effort to enforce United Nations sanctions against North Korea, according to a statement from the Australian Defense Ministry.
Albanese called the Chinese actions “completely unacceptable” in a television interview Tuesday.“They’re in international waters, international airspace, and they’re doing work to ensure that the sanctions that the world has imposed through the United Nations on North Korea, due to their intransient and reckless behavior, are enforced,” the prime minister told CNN affiliate Nine News.
“They shouldn’t have been at any risk while they engaged in that behavior,” Albanese said of the Australian crew.“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,” Maj. Rob Millen, air officer aboard the Royal Canadian Navy frigate HMCS Ottawa, told CNN after the October incident.
After that incident China defended its actions and accused Canadian forces of conducting unspecified “malicious and provocative act with ulterior motives.”Australian opposition leader Peter Dutton urged Albanese to call Chinese leader Xi Jinping to express Canberra’s concerns over the latest incident, but also over a long list of Chinese encounters with Australian and allied aircraft and ships. “At some stage, there’s going to be a miscalculation and an Australian Defence Force member is going to lose their life. That is a tragic circumstance that has to be avoided at all costs,” Dutton said in an interview with Nine News.
“There will be a miscalculation by somebody who’s flying that jet or somebody who’s on the deck of a Chinese naval ship. Something will happen and that’s what, not just Australia is worried about, the Philippines, Japan, obviously the United States, many other countries in the region, who are very worried about these acts that continue to be provocative, and completely and utterly unnecessary,” Dutton said.
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