Chinese daredevil ‘saluted’ EP-3 pilot

By Paul Sperry

WASHINGTON – The Chinese fighter pilot who intercepted a U.S. reconnaissance plane over the South China Sea got so close during one pass that a crew member “jumped back and yelled” for fear the jet “was going to keep coming right through the window,” a newly released Navy report reveals.

“The pilot was a mere three to five feet away from the EP-3,” according to a four-page “Statement of Facts” report on the incident last year, prepared by the commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Hawaii.

Judicial Watch Inc., a public-interest law firm here, uncovered the paper in a Freedom of Information Act request.

On the first pass, the Chinese F-8 pilot “saluted” the EP-3 flight crew, the report says. Before making a second pass, he “unhooked one side of his oxygen mask” and mouthed words to the flight crew while motioning with his hand in a “pushing motion.”

On the third and final “run-in rendezvous maneuver,” the daredevil pilot came in with too much speed and couldn’t pull back in time before hitting one of the EP-3’s four propellers.

“The F-8 was basically chopped in half,” said the report, which was written two weeks after the April 1, 2001, collision.

Besides knocking out the EP-3’s No. 1 engine, the impact sheered off the plane’s nose cone, the report says. The damages forced the EP-3 to make an emergency landing on Hainan Island in communist China.

The report says the pilots slowed the plane’s descent to buy time for crew to “complete the destruction sequence” – presumably regarding top-secret computer equipment and related technical manuals, although it does not say. Pilots also made a 360-degree turn to allow more time to “accomplish their required checklists,” the report adds without elaborating.

After landing at Lingshui airfield in Hainan, the EP-3 was met by “two trucks loaded with 12 to 15 people per truck, and more people on foot,” the report said. They surrounded the plane like a “human fence.”

The report says only “several” of them were armed. Later, after the crew emerged from the plane, the Chinese posted guards at the base of the EP-3 ladder.

The 24 crew members were loaded on a bus, where they were given “water and cigarettes” after about two hours, according to the report, which quotes crew members. A van shuttled them to bathrooms.

“No Chinese personnel entered the EP-3 during the two hours the crew remained on the bus,” the report said.

The paper, which had names of crew members redacted, but apparently nothing more, made no reference to any struggles on or off the plane, or mistreatment of crew members by their Chinese captors.

Contrary to Beijing’s claims the American plane violated China airspace, the Navy report asserted: “The EP-3 was clearly in international air space more than 70 miles off the coast of Hainan, and (crew members) were already headed (back to the base) with the auto-pilot on.”

It also said the crew was on a “routine reconnaissance flight.”

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Paul Sperry

Paul Sperry, formerly WND's Washington bureau chief, is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives have Penetrated Washington." Read more of Paul Sperry's articles here.