In practice, Americans want to know whether Japan would shoot down missiles overflying Japan: current constitutional interpretations seem to forbid it.
Airlines file flight plans with air-traffic control, choosing routes in accordance with NOTAMs and any other "rules of the road" (such as overflying sensitive military installations).
And every so often come rumblings of another war, as has happened this month when Eritrea banned the UN from overflying its territory, drawing accusations from Ethiopia that it was shifting troops to the border.The UN Security Council was due to discuss the crisis on October 27th.
Airlines file flight plans with air-traffic controllers, choosing routes in accordance with NOTAMs and other "rules of the road", such as not overflying sensitive military installations.
Since October, the armed forces have been overflying the zone, patrolling its edges, and restricting access to the area by foreigners.
Range safety officers finally detonated their charges 30 seconds later to prevent them from overflying land.
A drone was also spotted overflying HMP Long Lartin in Worcestershire at night on a possible reconnaissance or distraction mission while another was found two weeks ago after crashing into fencing at Liverpool Prison.
Q| Were there warnings in place about overflying the area in case of a missile attack?
We once flew back from Japan to Rome via Alaska to avoid overflying the Soviet Union.
The Russians were well aware that America's so-called weather reconnaissance planes, overflying their airspace at 70,000ft, were trying to get pictures of their intercontinental ballistic missiles in the vast, closed nuclear-testing areas of Kazakhstan and the Urals.
They are also talking to the drone industry about the potential to programme the GPS coordinates of prison no-fly zones into the majority of drones on the market so they are blocked from overflying jails.
