  Supplemented with suitable buffering techniques, the low-frequency part of
the SKA can be used as an ultra-precise detector for cosmic-ray air showers at
very high energies. This would enable a wealth of scientific applications: the
physics of the transition from Galactic to extragalactic cosmic rays could be
probed with very high precision mass measurements, hadronic interactions could
be studied up to energies well beyond the reach of man-made particle
accelerators, air shower tomography could be performed with very high spatial
resolution exploiting the large instantaneous bandwidth and very uniform
instantaneous $u$-$v$ coverage of SKA1-LOW, and the physics of thunderstorms
and possible connections between cosmic rays and lightning initiation could be
studied in unprecedented levels of detail. In this article, we describe the
potential of the SKA as an air shower radio detector from the perspective of
existing radio detection efforts and discuss the associated technical
requirements.
