BEIJING: China launched a weather satellite on Sunday as international civilian flights changed their routes to avoid a Chinese-imposed no-fly zone to northern Taiwan that Beijing has put in place owing to the possibility of falling rocket debris, Reuters said.
Taiwan’s transport ministry said in a statement that Beijing had initially notified Taipei that it will impose a no-fly zone from Sunday to Tuesday but later it reduced it to 27 minutes on Sunday after Taiwan protested.
The no-fly announcement shook regional nerves as it followed shortly after China staged new war drills around Taiwan which Beijing considers as a sovereign Chinese territory.
China’s main contractor for its space programme, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, said that the weather satellite, Fengyun 3G, successfully launched from the northwestern province of Gansu at 9:36 am on Sunday morning.
The contractor said the satellite then entered its set orbit, describing the launch as a “total success”. The Fengyun 3G is a low-earth orbit satellite designed to track rainfall.
It did not say the flight path of the Long March 4B rocket carrying the satellite, but the time coincided with China’s previous announcement about the no-fly zone.
China said it was inaccurate to call it a no-fly zone, though Taiwan had issued a notice to airmen, or NOTAM, that uses the wording “airspace blocked owing to aerospace flight activity”.
Taiwan’s defence ministry said that some debris from the rocket launch had fallen into the “warning zone” off the island’s northern coast, but it did not affect Taiwan’s territorial safety.
Flights to and from Taiwan and China, Taiwan and South Korea and Taiwan and Japan were amongst those detouring around the zone on Sunday morning, according to routes tracked on Flightradar24.
Normal flight paths resumed shortly after 10 am.
The no-fly zone was over the East China Sea, slightly northeast of Taiwan which routinely sees heavy civilian flight traffic.
Taiwan’s Civil Aeronautics Administration said that in a one-hour period starting from 9 am, 33 flights had to change their routes, adding an extra five to 10 minutes of flying time.
