This has caused the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to demote Indonesia to category 2 (unsafe) and the EU has banned most Indonesian airlines, with a few exceptions, from flying to Europe. There is also the Singapore flight information region issue and the major job of restoring Indonesia’s ICAO Council membership.

Meanwhile, the problem of passenger and air traffic density at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Cengkareng hasn’t yet been properly handled. 

For instance, the opening of the additional Ultimate Terminal 3 has so far been delayed. Halim airport has since 2015 had to accommodate the excess of the airport’s air traffic.

In April, two Batik Air and Trans Nusa planes grazed one another’s wings, but the cause of the accident hasn’t been announced yet. The aviation authorities’ response was to provide higher frequency of civil commercial flights at Halim.

As the situation further developed, through an erroneous analysis of the growing air traffic density and mistaken reports to decision makers, the idea was floated to open the southern air space of Java to civil commercial flights. 

The air traffic density arising lately is due to the management incapability of civil commercial flight operators to facilitate aircraft takeoff and landing activity at Soekarno-Hatta and some other airports, including Halim.

Civil commercial flight operators overly and solely focus on the target of further increasing the number of routes amid booming air transportation. Nearly all military air bases are now being strained by the expanding civil commercial lines. 

The takeoff and landing queues at Cengkareng and Halim already last up to 45 minutes. This situation needs to be overcome. Opening flight lanes in southern Java won’t solve the problem at all, and will in fact lead to a worse quandary.

The air space in southern Java, especially around the zones of Central Java and East Java, has long been reserved for military aviation purposes with a profile of flights far different from that of civil airliners. 

The aircraft in the zones are mostly capable of exceeding the speed of sound, while frequently conducting aerobatic and formation maneuvers, as well as air-to-air firing, air-to-ground rocketing and bombing exercises. 

Such flight training requires a convenient and secure column of air space because of its goal of improving the combat-readiness of Air Force aircraft. 

If the plan to open the southern Java airspace to civil commercial flights were implemented, the national air defense system already painstakingly developed for decades would be ruined at a stroke. 

The combat structure for air defense as incorporated in the national air defense management system comprising the air bases of Halim, Atang Senjaya in Bogor, Husein Sastranegara in Bandung — both in West Java — Adi Sutjipto in Yogyakarta, Iswahyudi in Madiun and Abdurrahman Saleh in Malang — both in East Java — as well as the allocation and management of air space for national defense and the air-to-ground firing range location on the southern coast, would be sent flying into a true muddle.

A national air transportation system relying merely on the development of flight routes will indeed inevitably lead uncontrolled expansion due to the absence of thorough planning. The development of commercial lines has penetrated military air bases and will also later encroach on the air space that has for decades been managed and developed in the interest of state defense and security.

Any alteration of aviation lanes already so meticulously developed over such a long time in the interests of state defense and security deserves reconsideration. The shattering of air space already fostered for national security and prosperity will entail even worse consequences in the future. 

The time has come to manage the national air territory according to a pattern that refers to inter-ministerial management standards at the government level in an integrated way. 

Short-term measures that merely enable the acceleration of air transportation route expansion will certainly infringe and ruin the order of another sector currently seeing normal growth and in observance of prevailing laws. 

Ensuring the rapid development of commercial flight routes would unnecessarily mess up another sector, let alone that closely connected with state defense and security. 

Such a move would not only reduce the level of aviation safety as a whole because of mixed civil and military flights in the same air column, but would also devastate the national air defense system in general. At this point, the action would run counter to the government’s attempts to be excluded from the FAA’s category 2 countries and to meet the ICAO’s civil aviation safety standards.

Accelerating the growth of air transportation lines should not emulate the means of boosting city transportation routes, in which drivers seek full payment of minivan rental fees. Civil commercial flights should follow modern management principles under nationally integrated planning. 

In this way, national aviation as part of the development of national air power will not be seen as “merely” oriented to a rise in air transportation “routes”.

***

The writer was chairman of the National Team for Transportation Safety and Security Evaluation in 2007.

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