UFOs: The next air disaster

Kamal Baruah

(kamal.baruah@yahoo.com)

There are numerous natural phenomena to explain Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) sightings in the past. UFOs are airborne objects or optical phenomena that an onlooker is unable to identify. It has been able to rule out any connection to extraterrestrial activity, and we don’t believe the alien hype anymore. It’s a fact that the planet Venus is often mistaken for a flying object. Its reflections on windows and eyeglasses can produce superimposed images. However, sightings of strange objects, or UFOs, in airspace have been reported around the world. They are actually a balloon or a drone nowadays.

Meanwhile, weather balloons often traverse our skies these days. Over thousands of human-made satellites are now orbiting the earth. When darkness falls, the sky starts revealing its spectacular sights. Night skies have been a human fascination where millions of bright stars huddled together in clusters. I sojourned once in the nights of Great Rann that stretches across enemy lines at the Gulf of Kutch. The skyline of Karachi could be seen at a distance from our detachment camp on the Indo-Pak border. Our base is operational around the clock in a secret location. We work day and night, sending Morse code with headphones on and monitoring the activities of fighter jets.

All of a sudden, we heard the noise of a helicopter hovering overhead. We had a scared look on our faces. It was a flying drone, and it flew away after leaving behind airborne imagery. US drones inadvertently entered our territory over the Arabian Ocean. India’s drone warfare had not arrived then but such kinds of mysterious flying objects do breach in our airspace illegally. While the Indian Navy is witnessing F-16 surveillance over its ships in the Indian Ocean from Diego Garcia, which is home to an American military base, India’s aircraft carrier has a limited presence in international waters with INS Viraat (decommissioned after 2017) and INS Vikramaditya. However, such incidents were seldom reported during the early 2010s.

The military drones, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), and remotely piloted aircraft (RPAs) came later and were used for photo-reconnaissance during the 1999 Kargil War with Pakistan, where Israel supplied India with IAI Heron and later Searcher drones for reconnaissance, but the system proved highly inefficient and strategically weak over the mountainous terrain. Nevertheless, DRDO has developed its own domestic UAVs (unmanned aircraft systems) such as Lakshya, Nishant, Rustom, etc. These drones would be the key to countering Pakistani rogue drones and Chinese spy drones.

The perceptions about drones are changing and increasingly diversified since the history dated in 1849, when Austrians attacked the city of Venice with balloons laden with explosives. The first pilotless aircraft were designed towards the end of World War I by the US Army using gyroscopic control. Later, during the 1930s, the US and England developed radio-controlled unmanned aircraft. The US used the Shamsi Air Base in Baluchistan to carry out hundreds of drone strikes on suspected Al Qaeda operatives in the mountainous tribal areas of bordering Afghanistan since 2008. The Pentagon did so in Pakistan in 2004 for counter-insurgency warfare and during the US invasion of Iraq.

Today, drones are used for personal (blog, vlog) and business purposes as well in the fields of transportation, agriculture and farming, security, surveying, mapping, real-time monitoring, and numerous other productive purposes. With the growing UAV market in India, the Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has issued guidelines on UAS operation at 200 ft above ground level (AGL) in an uncontrolled airspace. The unmanned Air Operator shall be required to file a flight plan and obtain clearances with the concerned Air Traffic Services (ATS) unit. Besides, there are high-altitude spy balloons hovering above 20,000 ft to 60,000 ft, and they pose a potential risk to civilian air traffic where aircraft fly around 35,000 ft above sea level.

Balloons are extremely mysterious even to the point of soundlessness. More than a spy balloon, this appears to be another new art of war. The recent balloon fiasco offers plenty of lessons in this regard. There was no coherent explanation as to why Beijing would use a sophisticated high-altitude balloon programme for surveillance or reconnaissance when satellites could do the job more effectively. Balloons are better as they can linger longer over a site. While satellites focus on imagery, but the balloons appear to be collecting communication in near space 50 miles above earth. It’s a major sphere of competition that is too high for most planes to stay aloft for long and too low for space satellites. Finally, the US had to go into overdrive with its default sledgehammer response by shooting down airborne balloons over Canada and Alaska with fearsome missiles fired by jet fighters.

Whoever gains the edge in near-space vehicles will be able to win more of the initiative in future wars. It may be linked with the fine tuning of Chinese hypersonic missiles. What is alarming for US that went through 9/11 allowing aerial incursions of its territory?

Russia is increasing surveillance activities with payload on NATO allies. Every state has complete and exclusive sovereignty over the airspace above its territory, which includes 12 nautical miles of territorial waters off the coastline. In a recent development, Pakistan has reportedly denied permission to Indian Air Force aircraft carrying relief material for earthquake-hit Turkey to fly over its airspace. Flight permits are required by flights to fly over or to land in a country’s airspace.

Flight safety is the highest priority of all those involved in aviation. We all know how dangerous a flock of birds striking an aeroplane is. Bird-aircraft strike hazard (BASH) is a collision between an airborne animal (usually a bird or bat) and a moving aircraft. Modern jet engines can suffer major damage from even small objects (left on the runway) being sucked into the engine. It is called Foreign Object Debris (FOD). Mysterious flying objects like balloons, drones could also hit a plane in mid-air if some UFOs rather engaged in espionage. Those uncontrolled UFOs over international airspace may lead in disaster in the making for tomorrow unless it adhered to International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) for ensuring aviation safety and protecting the public from aviation hazards.