Nancy Pelosi’s plane took a three-hour detour to get to Taiwan
The US Air Force plane carrying the House Speaker was forced to avoid flying over the South China Sea, where Beijing has been performing military drills.
The US Air Force plane carrying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan took a three-hour detour to avoid potential military conflicts in the South China Sea.
Mrs Pelosi landed in Taiwan late Tuesday local time, defying repeated warnings from Beijing against a visit that China’s Communist Party regards as a challenge to its sovereignty. The plane carrying Mrs Pelosi and other Democratic lawmakers departed from the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur on Tuesday afternoon and took a circuitous route that appeared designed to avoid transiting the South China Sea, where Beijing has an established military presence.
Hundreds of thousands of people who closely tracked the plane – designated SPAR19 – in real time on flight-tracking website Flightradar24 noticed the unusual route of the carrier, which flew in an arc over the island of Borneo and around the Philippines, instead of the near-linear route over the South China Sea that is taken by most commercial flights, said a spokesman for the flight-tracking site, Ian Petchenik.
The average flight time for a commercial flight from Kuala Lumpur to Taipei is about four hours and 15 minutes, said Mr Petchenik. He said SPAR19 took just over seven hours.
The reason for the detour was to ensure security, said Bonnie Glaser, Asia program director of German Marshall Fund of the US, a think tank based in Washington, DC. She also said the route avoided the Taiwan Strait. “They were doing whatever they deemed necessary to keep the plane safe,” she said.
China’s military responded with a show of force. The People’s Liberation Army sent an unspecified number of Russian-made Su-35 jet fighters flying over the Taiwan Strait, Chinese state broadcaster China Central Television reported minutes ahead of Mrs Pelosi’s arrival on Tuesday evening. The broadcaster later released footage of drills carried out by the Eastern Theater Command overseeing People’s Liberation Army forces positioned closest to Taiwan.
China’s vice foreign minister, Xie Feng, also summoned the US ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
Thousands paid close attention to flight-tracking websites during the day in Asia to see for themselves whether Mrs Pelosi would indeed head to Taiwan. Mrs Pelosi announced the itinerary for her Asia trip on Sunday without ruling Taiwan in or out. China has strongly objected to the trip by the highest-ranking US official in a quarter-century.
Using flight-tracking sites – which collect data from signals that are automatically sent from operating aircraft to identify their locations in real time – to follow the movements of government officials or celebrities has become a popular sport on social media. At one point, more than 700,000 people were tracking the plane that carried Mrs Pelosi, making the plane the most-tracked flight on the website to date, Mr Petchenik said.
The unusual path taken by SPAR19 toward Indonesia set off rounds of speculation on Twitter, including whether it might be avoiding traveling over the South China Sea, where China has been conducting military drills and has militarized a number of artificial islands.
– Wall Street Journal
More Coverage
Trump slaps tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China in opening salvo of trade war
The US has informed its northern neighbours it will be imposing a 25 per cent tariff on all imports starting Tuesday, as Mexico braces itself for more punitive action from Donald Trump.
Vaccine information, transgender references scrubbed from US websites
US officials have removed internet pages containing references to gender identity and diversity following Trump administration orders.