The ship GeoBarents ended the third intervention in the Mediterranean, the second after the assignment of the port of La Spezia. The decree-law, signed by Minister Matteo Piantedosi, states that “the port of discharge assigned by the competent authorities has been reached without delay for completing the rescue operation”. The ship says it is acting “in accordance with international law of the sea” and is traveling with nearly 240 migrants on board, but a new tug-of-war is looming. It is currently impossible to determine if the ship has the second and third operations went off course and thus violated the decree.Meanwhile, the Ocean Viking has also put to sea again, but not only that, because the‘Airplane the NGO Sea Watch, seabird 2a Beechcraft 58 Baron aircraft taking off from Lampedusa.
As the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières itself noted, the first operation at sea was carried out after the signaling of this plane, which flies over international waters on the border with Libya, to indicate to ships at sea where to go for their operations. “An overcrowded dinghy was sighted by Sea Bird 2 in international waters off Libya,” read the tweet in which MSF announced its first outreach to 69 migrants. In 2019, ENAC blocked the planes of the NGO Sea Watch on the ground, moonbird and humming-birdwhich prevents them from launching for operations of this nature.
“National regulations dictate that these aircraft may only be used for recreational and non-professional activities,” ENAC said four years ago. In this case it was ultralight aircraft, a propeller-driven Cirrus Sr22 and Mcr-4S. The latter in particular, ENAC explained, “is not an aircraft certified to known safety standards and has a special flight permit that is not recognized for conducting operations on the high seas. It has also undergone significant changes, of which we have no trace. Search and rescue are professional operations that require a permitting system incompatible with amateur-built aircraft.
After the Moonbird and Colibrì blockade, the NGOs equipped themselves with the Beechcraft 58 Baron, a light twin-engine aircraft that cost several euros hundreds of thousands of euros, classified as a passenger aircraft. With this aircraft, the Ong can cover an area of about 27,000 square kilometers and stay in the air for about 7.5 hours.