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...EP-3E crew members winged their way back from China, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent them a congratulatory message. "You put your lives at risk," he told them, "so that the citizens of a grateful nation can live their lives in peace and freedom." Which raises a key question: Is it really necessary, with all the Pentagon's technological wizardry, to dispatch repeatedly two dozen of America's youngest and finest into the teeth of the Chinese dragon...
...however, is in no mood right now to back away from manned flights along the Chinese coast. Such a move would be seen in Beijing as a victory for the hard-liners there who wanted to hang on to the EP-3E's 24-member crew...
...Moreover, any drone capable of replicating the EP-3E mission is far down the road. After all, the Air Force only now is building Global Hawk drones at $50 million a pop to replace the venerable U-2 spy planes. The new drones, capable of loitering high over hostile terrain for more than a day, should be flying real-world missions by 2010?a full half-century after the Soviet Union shot down Francis Gary Powers...
...video was chilling. On Friday afternoon, after the U.S. flight crew was safely back in the U.S., Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld began a reporters' briefing with a frightening recording made by a U.S. EP-3E crew flying near China in January. The video image showed a Chinese F-8 jet hotdogging and harassing the American aircraft. Flying on the very edge of controllability, the F-8 pilot slowed his fighter down enough to dance alongside the U.S. plane. At one moment the nose fell dramatically, almost banging into the U.S. plane. U.S. officials say the pilot could very well...
...collision, but details of the flight that emerged last week were even more 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...