Word: eps
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...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...
...Besides setting limits on how close their planes fly to ours, the major issue will be agreeing on the map of Chinese airspace. Beijing has a rather flexible definition of international waters. In fact they're claiming the U.S. EP-3 was inside an economic exclusion zone around some islands, although Washington disputes this. So a major issue at the meeting will be establishing the boundaries of China's sovereignty. A lot of the discussion is going to be over cartography. You shouldn't be sending warplanes up with these things undecided, because you don't want...