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...terrifying. The accident over the South China Sea very nearly killed all 24 aboard the U.S. plane. Chinese fighters had intercepted U.S. reconnaissance missions 43 times since December, Lieut. Shane Osborn knew as he flew his EP-3E in the early hours of April Fools' Day. Six times, F-8s zipped past the lumbering U.S. planes with less than 30 ft. to spare. Twice they had come within 10 ft. of the U.S. aircraft, "thumping" them by rocking the American planes in the turbulence of their exhaust. But on the 44th intercept, the Chinese, according to the U.S. account, went...
...episode began when a pair of F-8s scrambled from the Lingshui air base on Hainan Island and began shadowing the U.S. plane. Wang brushed twice within 5 ft. of the U.S. plane before he misjudged and flew his jet's tail through the EP-3E's left outboard propeller. "The first thing I thought," Osborn recalled Saturday, "was this guy just killed us." The F-8 broke in half, slicing off the EP-3E's nose and disabling the right wing's inner engine. Wang fell to his death along with the flaming wreckage. The U.S. plane plunged into...
...about 5 min.--and up to 8,000 ft. of altitude--before Osborn could regain control. As the plane's unbalanced engines and sheared nose combined to shake the EP-3E violently, Osborn decided his best choice was to make for Lingshui, the closest airfield and one the F-8s had left only minutes before. Once the crew realized it was going to land in China, it began carrying out its "classified destruction plan," which parcels out the plane's most sensitive gear for erasure or destruction by individual crew members...
Pentagon and Navy officials and pilots uniformly deride the Chinese claim that the lumbering turboprop airplane, which can travel only half as fast as the pair of Chinese F-8s that were shadowing it, was to blame for the accident. "That claim makes as much sense as a guy in a powerboat complaining when he hits a sailboat," one senior Navy officer said. "It's the powerboat guy's responsibility - just like it's the jet pilot's responsibility - to avoid the slow mover...
...Because the U.S. plane was being tracked by a pair of F-8s - a homegrown version of the Russians' venerable MiG-21 - there was talk that an effort by the crew of the EP-3 to avoid one of the F-8s might have inadvertently led to a collision with the second. But Navy officials both in Washington and at Pacific Command headquarters in Hawaii said there was no evidence yet that such a "pinching" movement took place...