Philippine patrol flight finds no new Chinese structure at Scarborough Shoal despite PLA radio warnings

A Philippine Coast Guard and Philippine Air Force patrol flight over Scarborough Shoal on Tuesday, 20 October, found no sign of a new structure that China had reportedly built at the reef, according to ABS-CBN News and GMA News, whose journalists flew with the crews. Chinese military radio operators warned the aircraft that they were in Chinese airspace and would be intercepted if they did not leave, but the flight went ahead without interference.

Before the coast guard's Cessna Caravan reached the shoal, which Manila calls Bajo de Masinloc or Panatag Shoal, radio challenges could already be heard between the Philippine Air Force and units of China's People's Liberation Army Navy and Air Force, ABS-CBN reported. The Chinese side said the aircraft were flying in airspace belonging to a Chinese maritime feature and claimed the shoal lay inside China's territorial airspace. GMA said a Chinese warship also issued a radio challenge to the patrolling air force plane.

The Philippine Air Force answered that the shoal sits inside the Philippines' exclusive economic zone. It called China's statements and actions illegal and said it had every right to fly routine maritime patrols over the area.

Checking the reported construction was a main purpose of the flight. GMA said the coast guard had received reports that China was building structures at the shoal, and ABS-CBN said the report concerned a structure allegedly put up on top of a rock. The aircraft dropped to about 200 feet, according to GMA, but neither crew saw any such installation.

What the crews did see was a familiar scene. ABS-CBN said two buoys that China placed at the shoal last year were still in position and that a floating barrier lay across the entrance to the lagoon. GMA described one yellow buoy inside the lagoon and a larger buoy outside the atoll that appeared to carry an antenna, which it said was the same buoy the coast guard had spotted a year earlier.

Chinese ships were also in the area. A Chinese research vessel was operating just outside the shoal, and GMA noted that no China Coast Guard ship was escorting it. Farther off, the crews sighted a PLA Navy warship and a vessel that ABS-CBN identified as part of China's maritime militia.

The two accounts differ in emphasis rather than substance. ABS-CBN recorded the explicit warning that the planes would be intercepted, while GMA stressed that no Chinese ship or aircraft actually interfered, which it described as unusual because the China Coast Guard and the PLA Navy have intercepted Philippine aircraft over the shoal before. A month earlier, on 17 September, a PLA Navy warship radio-challenged a coast guard Piper Navajo during a fuel and food handout to Filipino fishermen at the shoal, the coast guard's West Philippine Sea spokesman, Rear Admiral Jay Tarriela, said at the time.

The patrol came a day after a change at the top of the coast guard. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. presided over the handover on Monday in which Rommel Supangan replaced Ronnie Gil Gavan as commandant, the Inquirer reported. GMA said Supangan pledged that the service would keep protecting Philippine waters on the president's orders and that its modernisation would continue, including talks with Japan on more 97-metre ships and with France on 35-metre fast craft.

Scarborough Shoal lies about 124 nautical miles off Masinloc in Zambales province, within the Philippines' 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone. A 2016 international arbitral award found that it is a traditional fishing ground for Filipino fishermen and that China had unlawfully prevented them from fishing there.