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Anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd dismissed Australian government plans to track Japan's annual whale hunt by air as a "sham."
It said the scheme was "toothless and cowardly."
Australia had announced an airborne customs agency mission to the Southern Ocean on Sunday, saying it would send a message to both sides that the world was watching.
Environment Minister Greg Hunt had previously promised to send a government ship to monitor the group's confrontation with the Japanese hunters but said later that airborne surveillance would increase the mission's reach and effectiveness.
Sea Shepherd criticised the U-turn, with Australian chairman Bob Brown describing it as a "pretty cowardly" backdown by the conservative government in a bid to appease Japan during free trade negotiations.
"They'll fly over and look from a great height. What are they going to do if something's going wrong down there?
"Where are they going to send a vessel from? Because those planes are not going to be able to intervene," Mr Brown said.
"It's a sham operation, this plane."
Mr Brown said the government's Antarctic vessel ACV Ocean Protector was on border patrol duties between Australia and Indonesia as part of a military-led crackdown on people-smuggling, instead of patrolling the southern fisheries.
"It is dangerous down there. We've got a violent Japanese whaling fleet on the way with grenade-tipped harpoons and it is dangerous to get in the way of that and uphold the law," he warned.
He said that Sea Shepherd's fleet would beat the Japanese harpooners to the Southern Ocean.
"We'll be there when they arrive," he said.
"Now Greg Hunt has said there will be a plane overhead sometime in January and February - the whaling fleet's going to be there before new year and we warned the government of this.
"This surveillance operation should be there from the outset.
"Instead, it's going to fail from the outset."
Each side claims to have been rammed by the other over the years and Sea Shepherd's vessel Ady Gil sank during a confrontation in January 2010.
