What’s on the clandestine nightly flights between Myanmar and China?

[lost in melb.]

Each night for more than a week, unregistered flights between Yangon and Kunming have been transporting unknown goods and personnel from China to Myanmar. The military regime that’s now in charge of Myanmar is trying very hard to hide the flights. The Chinese government and Myanmar Airways have claimed the planes were carrying seafood exports. However, the details of the flights in question make that highly unlikely.

When the Myanmar military, the Tatmadaw, took over the country, it banned international flights. Very few flights are now using Yangon airport, and even fewer are flying internationally. But averaging five flights a night, up to three planes have been making trips to Kunming in southern China. Two of the planes are painted with Myanmar Airways colours and the other is unmarked. All of them are leased from private firms, so they should be in good working order.

Whoever has arranged these flights is going to great lengths to hide them. The planes’ transponders have been turned off, a violation of international aviation rules. We know the transponders work because we can see that they have been turned off for specific flights and then turned on for others. Beyond that, the Kunming Airport hasn’t registered them online as arrivals. Flight data is often missing from international flight databases, including flight numbers, call signs and even destinations. The failure to include scheduled departure and arrival times, as opposed to the actual times, makes it particularly difficult to track them on open-source flight databases.

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https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/wh...mar-and-china/