MELBOURNE, Australia — Maritime patrol and maritime surveillance aircraft are a vital tool in ensuring what is known as maritime domain awareness, and they serve as a complementary asset for navies and coast guards protecting their nation’s maritime interests.

The aircraft’s chief advantages are speed and operating altitude, which bestow faster response times in getting to where they are needed, as well as improved sensor performance compared to seagoing vessels.

Maritime domain awareness, or MDA, is defined by the International Maritime Organization as the “effective understanding of anything that could impact the security, safety, economy, or environment” of all areas and things “of, on, under, relating to, adjacent to, or bordering on a sea, ocean, or other navigable waterway.” These include “all maritime-related activities, infrastructure, people, cargo, and vessels and other conveyances.”

In recent years, the issue of MDA in Southeast Asia has received significant attention. The Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea run through the region, and the importance of both waterways to global maritime trade cannot be understated, as they’re the fastest routes through which ships travel from Europe, the Middle East and Africa to the East Asian economic powerhouses of China, Japan and South Korea.

The numbers bear this out. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development estimated that roughly one-third of all global shipping passed through the South China Sea in 2015, while the U.S. Energy Information Administration said that in the same period, 16 million barrels of petroleum and other liquids transited the Strait of Malacca each day.