TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Restoring sovereignty over Indonesian skies
Beyond Indonesia’s wishes, parts of its airspace have been under Singapore’s Aviation Authority since 1946.
Change Size
Illustration of a plane taking off over a runway. (Shutterstock/hxdyl)
T
he management of air traffic and flights in the country follows the regulations set by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), which has divided Indonesian skies into three flight information regions (FIRs), namely Jakarta, Makassar and Singapore.
The Singapore FIR covers quite a large part Indonesia’s airspace jurisdiction. Beyond Indonesia’s wishes, parts of its airspace have been under Singapore’s Aviation Authority since 1946. In fact, no country would ever delegate its aviation authority to another country without the will of the delegating country.
Under such circumstances, Indonesia has for over 70 years been facing limitations and obstacles in exercising its right to control flight operations in its own airspace. Flight operations in the region include not only flight activities related to aviation in the context of aero-economic development for the welfare of a wider community, but also concern flight operations in national security and defense.
The fact that Indonesia has been experiencing difficulties in asserting its sovereignty over airspace above Riau Islands due to the Singapore FIR contradicts the Chicago Convention’s 1944 rule of international law, which states that air sovereignty of a country is “complete” and “exclusive”. What has been happening in the skies of Riau Islands is therefore very strange as a sovereign state like Indonesia has been deprived of its sovereignty over its airspace.
This inconvenient truth was the reason behind President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s issuance of a 2015 presidential instruction that ordered all relevant ministries to immediately ensure the Singapore FIR by 2019 enables Indonesia to manage its sovereign airspace between Aceh and Papua.
Yet since the presidential instruction was issued, there has not yet been any visible and meaningful development, apart from fragmentary statements from several related ministers.
Some of the ministers are of the opinion that the Singapore FIR is only a matter of safety, not security. But safety and security are two sides of the same coin, since the air-combat training areas of the Singaporean Air Force are regulated by the Singapore FIR, overshadowing the fact that Indonesia has its own sovereign airspace in the FIR.
