Word: aircrafting
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...area, the Chinese pilots had become more aggressive. "Sometimes they're so close you can see their faces," David Cecka, Aviation Electronics Technician 2nd Class onboard the downed plane, had told his mother. It got so bad that U.S. officials complained. "We went to the Chinese and said, 'Your aircraft are not intercepting in a professional manner. There is a safety issue here,'" recalls Admiral Dennis Blair, head of the U.S. Pacific Command. "It's not normal practice to play bumper cars...
...designed to sound firm but not threatening. The White House had decided not to attack the Chinese pilot for hotdogging near the U.S. plane, and instead called the collision an "accident." "Our priorities are the prompt and safe return of the crew," Bush said, "and the return of the aircraft without further damaging or tampering...
...crew briefing rooms at Hong Kong's Kai Tak Airport were abuzz with reports of construction at an air base near Sanya, a town at the southern tip of China's Hainan island. To date, the runway had been all bitumen, a surface suited to propeller aircraft but given to melting if hit by jet exhausts. Suddenly, concrete sections appeared at each end. Pilots flying along aviation routes past Hainan could see new, jet-fighter-sized dispersal bays under construction. One Cathay Pacific Airways pilot suggested to a Hong Kong official that, in view of the apparent defense buildup, flight...
...couple of weeks later, Cathay Pacific had reason to regret the inaction. On July 23, one of its passenger aircraft, a DC-4 Skymaster en route from Bangkok to Hong Kong, became the centerpiece of a three-day imbroglio that U.S. Navy historians later labeled the Hainan Incident. The death toll was higher than last week's affair: four of the DC-4's 12 passengers and crew died. And the U.S. reaction was considerably less muted...
That morning the Cathay airliner was at 2,700 m in clear sky, some 30 km off Hainan's east coast. At about 8:40 a.m., two Chinese fighters suddenly appeared. The aircraft were later identified as Lavochkin LA-7s, Soviet-built prop-driven fighters. For no apparent reason, the planes opened machine-gun and cannon fire. The DC-4's captain Philip Blown tried evasive action, hurling the DC-4 into a steep dive. But the airliner kept taking hits. Syd's Pirates: A Story of an Airline (Durnmount, 1983), by retired Cathay senior captain Charles "Chic" Eather, documents...