Word: aircrafts
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Everyone had a job to do onboard the dying Navy reconnaissance plane when it began to fall out of the sky. The two pilots up front were trying to save the aircraft, while the other 22 crew members in back were trying to destroy what was inside it. Two Chinese F-8 fighters had been tracking the plane closely, too closely, for 10 minutes. The U.S. flyers even recognized one of the pilots, Wang Wei, a notorious hotdogger who one time flew so close to an American plane that he could be seen holding up his e-mail address...
...most of the week, China answered U.S. appeals to release the downed spy plane and its crew with the diplomatic equivalent of "Your call is important to us, please stay on the line..." And despite President Bush's admonition to cease tampering with the aircraft, the Chinese made no effort to hide the fact that they were all over it like a NASCAR pit crew...
...realm in a talk-show culture. Which is why placating the U.S. public may become a crucial challenge for the Bush administration in the coming days as it moves quietly to untangle the spy-plane imbroglio and bring home the 24 U.S. servicemen and women and their aircraft. Mindful of the fact that public pressure on Beijing is more likely to prolong than resolve the crisis, Washington worked to cool the temperature of the dispute Wednesday: No more clock-is-ticking public statements by President Bush. Instead, Secretary of State Colin Powell was on point, issuing a statement of regret...
...cities, and Jiang was criticized for being too forgiving over the incident. Given the way China's state-controlled media have portrayed the spy-plane incident - as an invasion of Chinese air space in which a Chinese plane was brought down by an aggressive maneuver by a U.S. aircraft - Beijing has stirred up similar public sentiment, which may have limited the leadership's space to seek a quick resolution...
...memory units that recorded the day's mission, are relatively simple. Others - shredding the computer floppy disks containing various encryption codes - are more complicated. The most sophisticated gear - various eavesdropping and cryptographic code machines - could be kept from prying eyes by smashing it with hammers and hatchets aboard the aircraft. Or it may have been pushed out of the plane's cargo door in weighted bags, in sort of a "Sailors Meet the Sopranos" moment, while still over the ocean, Navy officials say. Additional papers and tapes could have been destroyed, probably after the plane was on the ground...