Thursday, April 5, 2001

By Ken Kaye, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.—There is no way a lumbering U.S. reconnaissance plane would intentionally veer into the path of a high-speed fighter jet, say pilots familiar with military operations, because to do so would be an act of suicide.

Those pilots said they find hard to believe China’s assertion that a Navy patrol plane caused the collision with a Chinese F-8 over the South China Sea on Sunday.

"This Chinese fighter is a very maneuverable airplane, and it still couldn’t get out of the way of this big, lumbering patrol plane? That’s absurd," said Robert Gandt, a former Navy fighter pilot and aviation author. "It would be like a sports car that couldn’t get out of the way of a truck."

More likely, the Chinese jet was making high-speed passes by the Navy EP-3E in an attempt to keep the bigger plane clear of Chinese territory, said Gandt, a retired Delta Air Lines pilot who now lives near Daytona Beach.

"They were there to harass and intimidate. This has been going on for some time," he said. "It’s the result of Chinese concern or anger over our reconnaissance flights."

Gandt, the author of Bogeys and Bandits, the making of a fighter pilot, knows the drill well.

As the pilot of a Navy A-4 fighter jet during the Cold War, he would buzz Russian "Bears" — four-engine reconnaissance planes — over the North Atlantic.

"These Bears were analyzing our anti-sub groups," he said. "The idea was to turn them back. It was also to let them know we knew what they were doing."

The F-8 is a Chinese-built plane based on the Russian Sukoi SU-27 Flanker, a twin-tail high-performance "look-down shoot-down" fighter capable of flying at 1,500 mph. It can be armed with cannons, rocket launchers and free-fall bombs.

Chinese news sources said the Russians authorized Beijing to produce the plane in the past three years as a means to counter U.S. and French fighter jets.

The EP-3E Aries II is a four-engine low-wing electronic warfare and patrol plane with a cruise speed of about 400 mph. It is a variation of the P-3 Orion, which the Navy has been flying since 1962, and a descendent of the Lockheed Electra.

In Sunday’s incident, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said the nose and left wing of the U.S plane hit the Chinese plane, causing it to crash in the sea. Chinese rescuers still were searching for the pilot on Tuesday.

The U.S. plane made an emergency landing on Hainan Island, south of the Chinese mainland.

The collision likely was a case of military games gone sour, pilots said. The U.S. plane would not have tried to turn into the path of the smaller plane because any mid-air collision runs an enormous risk of disaster for both planes, no matter the size difference between the two.

While the Chinese F-8 weighs about 16 tons, the Navy EP-3E weighs about 70 tons.

"The P-3 is just a much bigger plane. It’s not something you would throw into a violent maneuver, particularly with a crew of 24 on board," said Walter Houghton, assistant to the director of Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and a seasoned pilot who has flown everything from transports to F-4 Phantom fighter jets.

Gandt said the U.S. plane would have no reason to intentionally engage the Chinese plane.

"The Navy patrol is on the defensive here," he said. "There’s not much you can do to intimidate a fighter."

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