By akademiotoelektronik, 05/11/2022

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The rising sun glows on the horizon at the small airport on the Italian island of Lampedusa, located between Tunisia and Sicily. The three crew members of the Seabird, the plane of the German organization Sea-Watch piloted by the Swiss NGO Humanitarian Pilots Initiative (HPI), engage on the runways. The tarmac is almost deserted, with the exception of the black and yellow helicopter from Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, which hummed above the island the day before.

The strong wind has finally died down. " It's a day when we can expect many boats ", comments Olivier, a former Air France airline pilot, now a trainer and pilot for HPI, responsible for checking the condition of the plane before to drive it for seven hours. To carry out a mission of this duration and save fuel, the aircraft now only accommodates four people. Pairs of binoculars, electronic tablets, camera and camera equipped with a long distance zoom complete the paraphernalia necessary for the mission. At 8:30 a.m., the Seabird rises. It will remain between 300 and 500 meters above sea level in order to maintain an altitude conducive to spotting boats.

This morning, the grey-blue sea melts almost completely into the hazy horizon, as the aircraft crosses the Maltese SAR (Search and Rescue) zone before arriving in the Libyan SAR. Since the 1980s, the Mediterranean has been divided into search and rescue zones at the expense of neighboring countries, such as Italy, Greece or Malta. The latter have the responsibility, according to international maritime law, to bring people and boats in distress to a safe port. Despite the risks of abuse, torture or slavery faced by migrants in Libya, the country has had an SAR since June 2018, recognized by the International Maritime Organization and structurally and financially supported by Italy and the European Union. The financing of a maritime research coordination center in Tripoli and coastguard services responsible for bringing people back to Libya has been repeatedly criticized by various media and NGOs (1). A process that tells of the outsourcing of migration control and the concealment of the role of European countries in the refoulement of thousands of people every year.

Raise the alarm and testify

The mission undertaken by the Seabird is therefore taking place in the search area where the risk of interception by the Libyan coast guard is greatest. The plane thus plans to wind through the air, remaining in close contact with a team based in Berlin, but also with the Alarm Phone network (2), which communicates information allowing the location of boats in distress. This morning, the boats are very numerous.

Distinguishing a migrant boat is not always easy from the air, especially when it comes to small wooden boats that may look like fishing boats. The shape, the color, the number of people on board, the speed of the boat on the water are determining elements. In the hours that followed, the Seabird spotted a lost boat and showed it the direction of the Italian coast by successively leaning left and right with its wings, tracing a kind of oscillation in the air perceptible from the sea.

The Seabird also alerts the rescue coordination centers at sea, NGO or merchant navy vessels likely to bring several boats back to the Italian coast before the arrival of the Libyan coast guard. “ From the air, you see a lot of things, but you cannot act directly, explains Chloe, researcher and longtime member of Sea-Watch. The best you can do is put pressure on other actors. »

Around eleven o'clock, information transmitted to the crew indicates the presence of a boat in an area overflown by a drone, and the probability that this information was quickly transmitted to the Libyan coast guard. A dialogue begins with the organization's ship, the Sea Watch 4, also at sea. When we arrived in the area, the coast guards were already present and managed to intercept the boat, with around fifty people on board. . Some jumped into the water to join the approaching NGO ship. It is then a question of filming and taking photos from the air to record, keep track of what is happening, especially in the event of abuse or violence committed by the coastguards. In this specific case, the people rescued by the crew of the Sea Watch 4 are safe and sound while those on the pontoon of the coast guard boat will be brought back to Libya.

Around noon, several deflated boats or burnt boat carcasses float, still smoking, on the sea, like so many vestiges of the numerous interceptions and destruction of engines by the Libyan coast guard. After almost six hours of mission, the device receives new information: a case of distress, very close to the Libyan coast. Less autonomous than drones, which can patrol more than an entire day, the Seabird must resolve to turn around. The fuel would run out, because it takes more than an hour for the return trip. On the way, even if the heat in the plane encourages drowsiness, the concentration remains maximum in order to be able to give the alert if people in distress are seen.

Big-budget agencies

Recounting the role of European Union agencies in building surveillance of the Mediterranean area helps to understand the current importance of air missions carried out by the Seabird. As Matthias Monroy, former parliamentary assistant, activist and author of a well-stocked site on surveillance issues (3), explains, "three agencies are currently managing security and surveillance issues in the Mediterranean Sea: Frontex, the -European Commission for Maritime Safety (EMSA) and the European Fisheries Control Agency (EFCA). Each has specific skills, so they are regularly called upon to collaborate". The most active and best endowed remains Frontex, with a budget of 544 million euros in 2021, its own equipment (ships, planes, vehicles) and a permanent corps of 5,000 agents (10,000 are planned by 2027 ).

The creation of the Libyan SAR, in 2018, was an opportunity for the agency to test its aerial surveillance service in collaboration with European countries, but also with the Libyan coast guard, which is nevertheless likely to send migrants in the hell denounced many times from the prisons of their country.

Since 2018, the budgets allocated to aerial surveillance have only increased. In 2021 alone, at least 84 million euros would have been spent in the form of contracts with different airlines. It would currently be a sixth of the total budget of the European agency. And helicopters or planes are not the only border surveillance devices to have appeared in the air in previous years. Since 2016, as -Matthias Monroy reminds us, EMSA and Frontex have spent no less than 300 million euros to make international waters a testing ground for the use of drones at medium altitude, before they can be deployed at land borders.

Frontex has been interested in the technology since 2009. After several tests carried out in Crete and Sicily, in 2018, in collaboration with Airbus and the public company Israel Aero-space Industries (IAI), Frontex ordered them, two years later later, for an amount of 50 million euros, his first drone, a Heron, which was certainly flying overhead at the time of the Seabird mission reported above. This model, equipped with thermal and electro-optical cameras, used in Afghanistan or in the Palestinian territories during the attack on Gaza at the end of 2008, was installed by Frontex in Malta in May 2021.

Another model, the Hermes 900, used in particular by the Israeli forces in Lebanon and Gaza, was ordered in 2020 for the same amount from the Israeli arms company Elbit Systems (accused of war crimes and human rights violations). It should be in charge of new surveillance missions in the Mediterranean area in 2022.

Even more recently, on October 20, 2021, the Portuguese company Tekever, associated with a subsidiary of the French National Center for Space Studies, announced that it had concluded a 30 million euro contract with EMSA to fly a drone for four years, which should carry out missions for Frontex. This drone would also be equipped with inflatable boats that could be deployed from the device to "rescue people" during search and rescue missions (4). Information that leaves you wondering about European migration policies. Because the renewal of ever more important contracts and the swarming of research programs carried out by the agency indicate that this is only the tip of the iceberg in the creation of a veritable wall of aerial surveillance in the Mediterranean area.

Technology deployment

Besides drones, tests involving two 35-metre long aircraft (or zeppelins) used by Frontex and the Greek Coast Guard were also carried out around Alexandroupoli and the islands Samos and Limnos since 2019. From armaments, designated to intercept, track vehicles, ships or missiles, they can stay in the air for more than forty days and are equipped with radar, thermal cameras and an identification system. According to a call for projects in June 2021, the agency would also like to extend its monitoring by soliciting companies involved in the construction of HAPS (High Altitude Pseudo Satellites), such as Airbus or Thales. The latter have developed devices capable of navigating in the stratosphere and acting as a missing link between the medium and low altitude drones and the satellites already used by the agency.

This unprecedented technological deployment combined with the criminalization of civil society actors present in the Mediterranean Sea since 2018 has encouraged NGOs to invest more and more heavily in the air in recent years. -Simultaneously to the -collaboration between Sea-Watch and HPI, the French organization Voluntary Pilots collaborates regularly with organizations such as Open Arms or SOS Méditerranée. For Chloe, who joined the airborne section of Sea-Watch in 2019 after a time spent on the boats, "it was increasingly difficult for civil society boats to go to sea in 2018, due to the threats that weighed on the NGOs. The only actors available remained the planes". For the moment, States have not dared to tackle these new ways of rescuing migrants in distress.

The first flights of Sea-Watch and HPI began in 2017 with the purchase of the Moonbird, piloted by retired or furloughed professionals. Very quickly exhausted by the number of missions and the climatic and meteorological conditions in the Mediterranean, this aircraft was replaced by the Seabird, purchased in 2020. This made it possible to extend the time of the missions and to take one more person on board .

Partially funded by Sea-Watch, the organization SearchWing (5) carried out, in September and October 2021, tests of small drones from the Sea Watch 3. " These drones are intended to find boats around our own boats, especially when the weather conditions are not favourable", explains Felix Weiss, spokesperson for Sea-Watch and head of flight operations. The latter plans very soon to purchase a new aircraft that would allow even more missions to be carried out in the spring of 2022. In this fight of David against Goliath, the war in the air has only just begun.

Article published jointly with Basta!

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(1) " Financing of the Libyan coast guard : three NGOs file a complaint with the European Court of Auditors ", www.infomigrants.net, April 28, 2020.

(2) alarmphone.org

(3) digit.site36.net

(4) "Tekever Signs Maritime Surveillance Contract with EMSA", www.navalnews.com, October 20, 2021.

(5) “ SearchWing.org. A model aircraft to safe lives", sea-watch.org