Word: ep
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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 on a piece of paper. It was Wang's plane that clipped the EP-3E's left wing, slashed one of its four propellers into pieces and smashed off the plane's nose before spiraling into the South China Sea. Rocked by the collision, the vibrating turboprop plunged 8,000 ft. before pilot Shane Osborn regained control. "Mayday! Mayday!" a flyer called into...
...soon, it won't become a crisis.'" But even Powell had trouble getting through for a private talk with anyone who mattered in Beijing, and the public tone was not encouraging. Chinese officials claimed that the U.S. plane had veered suddenly into the F-8 fighter, even though the EP-3E is about half as fast as and far less nimble than the Chinese jet. The collision had occurred about 70 miles off China's coast; China considers its sovereign airspace to extend 200 miles offshore, even though international agreements recognize only 12 miles. Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao declared...
When satellite photographs showed the plane partly covered in tarps--the better to hide the work of prying Chinese engineers--it confirmed the Administration's fears. While the EP-3E is an old plane, a model that began flying in 1969, its electronic guts are up-to-the-minute. No EP-3E has ever been shot down or captured, even though the "flying pig," as it is called, is a long-range, slow-flying unarmed aircraft. "The most important thing to the Chinese on that airplane was the data we had collected earlier that day," says Norman Polmar, an independent...
TIME.com: Now that the 24 detained U.S. personnel have returned from Hainan, the Navy faces the question of when to relaunch surveillance missions. There have been reports that the USS Kitty Hawk, currently sailing for Guam, could be deployed in the South China Sea to provide fighter escorts for EP-3s. How likely is the Navy to send up fighters...
...international airspace, and there's a feeling in some quarters that sending fighter escorts sends a signal that we think we're doing something wrong or hostile. They shouldn't need fighter escorts. Then again, you don't want to be the admiral who made that call if an EP-3 is shot down on Thursday. They may decide to have fighters nearby, but not actually escorting the surveillance plane...