As one of the elements of exercising sovereignty and authority of governments in the open seas, military aircraft should have complete immunity from the sovereignty of any state other than the flag state. Also, the rule contained in annex 2 of the Chicago Convention regarding the sovereign jurisdiction of countries over aircraft registered in their territory can also be considered generalizable in this regard. Due to the many similarities and exchanges between the rules of the law of the sea and international air law, it seems that things like the right to immediately pursue, intercept, inspect and even seize the offending aircraft are among the rights and privileges of military aircraft in the high seas.
The main subject of this article focused on the legal status of the military aircraft in the high seas. For this purpose, the legal status of the military aircraft, the freedom of overflight, the right of hot pursuit, the right of visit. The 1944 Chicago Convention neither explicitly nor implicitly negated the customary norms affecting the legal status of military aircraft as initially codified within the 1919 Paris Convention. So the status of military aircraft was not redefined with the Chicago Convention and remains, as stated in the 1919 Paris Convention, as a norm of customary international law.
According to the Article 95 of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) warships on the high seas have complete immunity from the jurisdiction of any State other than the flag State. We can suppose that the military aircraft in the high seas have also complete immunity from the
jurisdiction of any State other than the flag State. According to the Article 111 (5) of the UNCLOS the right of hot pursuit may be exercised only by warships or military aircraft, or other ships or aircraft clearly marked and identifiable as being on government service and authorized to that effect. We can conclude that the right of hot pursuit may be exercised by military aircraft. According to the Article 110 of the UNCLOS a warship which encounters on the high seas a foreign ship, is not justified in boarding it unless there is reasonable ground for suspecting that: (a) the ship is engaged in piracy, (b) the ship is engaged in the slave trade, (c) the ship is engaged in an unauthorized broadcasting and the flag State of the warship has jurisdiction under article 109, (d) the ship is without nationality, or (e) though flying a foreign flag or refusing to show its flag, the ship is, in reality, of the same nationality as the warship. These provisions apply mutatis mutandis to military aircraft.
The purpose of this research is to investigate the possibility of applying the rights and sovereign powers of military aircraft in the high seas with emphasis on the rights of warships and the main question is, what position do these rights have in the rules of international law and how can a military aircraft to enjoy these rights in a desirable way? The current research is applied in terms of its purpose, and in terms of the method of collecting information, it is a library, and the data analysis is done qualitatively with descriptive and content analysis methods.