Global

Phew! Another Threat Not to Worry About (Spying From Above Dept.)

By James Fallows

Yesterday I was doing an errand in the car and caught the tail end of a discussion on a rebroadcast Diane Rehm show about Chinese spying in the United States. A flight instructor called in to mention something that greatly concerned him. Prospective pilots for Chinese airlines often came to the US for flight training, as do pilots from many other parts of the world. The US may be lagging in many areas, but we're still far and away #1 in the flight-school category.

What bothered the instructor is that Chinese students would bring cameras along on flights and take pictures from the cockpit. Including when they were near military bases! (Or doing practice approaches at military airfields, which in some case is possible as part of flight training.) He didn't like that at all, and he made them erase the photos before they could leave the plane. As I was getting out of the car, the guest was starting to congratulate the flight instructor on these prudent steps.

It is a relief to know that he has been so careful. Imagine the threat to national security if there were some way for non-Americans to know what U.S. military facilities looked like from above.

If, for instance, they could get an idea of the looks and layout of the Miramar Marine Corps Air Station in southern California, one-time home of the Top Gun school:

Miramar.png



Or the Lemoore Naval Air Station in central California, where the Pacific fleet's aircraft units have their land base:

Lemoore.png



Or a facility I won't name but have flown over many times in small airplanes, where nuke material is stored:

NukeStorage.png



Or parts of the naval shipyard and base whence nuclear subs set sail:

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Subs.png


Or even the Pentagon!

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So it is heartening to know that, given their dispute with Google, the Chinese would never stoop to using Google Earth to get a glimpse of these sites.

(Larger point, installment #12,872: If you get upset about things that don't matter, what's left over for real threats?)

After the jump, the other side of the balance: that China's facilities are of course exposed in just the same way.

For instance, a PLA Air Force base outside Beijing:

Thumbnail image for BeijingAirBase.png

For better and worse, mainly better, visibility-from-above is a reality governments everywhere need to cope with. And we can check "foreign pilots with cameras" off the list of things to fret about.