CONFIDENTIAL
14)
布政司署
香港下亞畢道
*** OUR REF.: CR 7/951/57 V
INDEX
No
來函檔號 YouR REF.:
AKLIBY!
JAB Stewart Esq OBE
HKK.184/1
GOVERNMENT SECRETARIAT
LOWER ALBERT ROAD
HONG KONG
10 January, 1978.
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Stables's Letter of 14 December to Robert Tesh in Hanoi (ED/19/01) crossed with my letter to you of 13 December Since receiving a copy of Stables's letter I have had a chance to discuss the points he makes both with the Director of Civil Aviation and with Robert Tesh who has been here on leave from Hanoi.
See
2.
From a purely air traffic control point of view, Stables is correct in saying that it would be possible for non-scheduled flights between Saigon and Hong Kong to enter the Hong Kong Area of Control Responsibility south of the boundary on route Red 85, i.e. the present route between Bangkok and Hong Kong which circumnavigates Indo-China. This would get over the difficulty of the present lack of communications on the civil aviation net between Hong Kong and Saigon.
Such an arrangement would of course need the agreement of the Bangkok air traffic control authorities, whose responsibility it would be to separate such flights from other traffic before they entered the Hong Kong area. In addition, the Director of Civil Aviation thinks it would be possible to allow some flights to leave route R.85 in the Hong Kong area at a tangent to shorten the distance to Saigon. This would only be possible on the way to Saigon, when such flights would be under adequate control from here. In other words, it would be possible for us to accept non- scheduled flights between Hong Kong and Saigon using this dog-leg route, providing that the Bangkok air traffic control authorities also agreed.
3.
That leaves the question of more.general political considerations on which I think we must be guided by London. We have no strong objection here to charter flights from Vietnam per se, providing the air traffic control problem can be resolved. They should not throw up the same sort of potential political/security problems as, say, regular flights or greater Vietnamese representation here.
Given
/contd.....
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CONFIDENTIAL