U.S., China agree on EP-3E return,
but process will take several weeks
By Pauline Jelinek, The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — It will be several more weeks before the United States gets back the
Navy spy plane that landed in China and became the center of a monthslong chill in
relations between the two countries.
China and the United States announced Thursday that they had agreed on a plan for the
EP-3 Aries II surveillance plane to be taken apart and shipped home on a private chartered
aircraft.
"This is a fairly complicated procedure but it’s not unprecedented by any
stretch," Defense Department spokesman Rear Adm. Craig Quigley said.
Since the 1960s, the Navy has taken apart P-3C patrol aircraft and converted them into
EP-3 spy planes, Quigley noted. He estimated it would be several weeks before the first
piece of the plane is flown out of China.
The agreement announced Thursday finally paves the way for the surveillance plane to be
transported off Hainan island, where it made an emergency landing April 1 after colliding
with a Chinese fighter that had been monitoring it.
The agreement was for the aircraft to be broken down into four major parts — the
two wings, the fuselage and the tail assembly — and the pieces flown home on an
Antonov 124 cargo plane or planes, Quigley said.
The collision and China’s 11-day detention of the plane’s crew caused the
worst U.S.-China tensions since NATO bombed the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia in the 1999
air war over Kosovo and then called it a mistake.
China expressed hope that ties with Washington could now be patched up.
"China and the U.S. have solved the plane incident," said Sun Yuxi, a Foreign
Ministry spokesman. "The crew members have returned, and now the disassembling and
transportation of the plane also is solved. So we hope bilateral relations can come back
to a normal track."
The Antonov, which Quigley described as the largest cargo aircraft in the world, will
be chartered from a private company and the Pentagon would like to hire two.
In addition to a four-member U.S. assessment team already in China, a fifth engineer
specializing in runways was to arrive in the coming hours to determine how much weight can
be born by the runway where the plane landed, Quigley said. The airport is normally used
by smaller, lighter fighter planes, he said.
The amount of weight the runway can bear will help determine how much can be put on
each flight off the island and, therefore, how many flights will be needed, he said.
Engineers and technicians from the plane’s manufacturer, Lockheed Martin Corp.,
will do the work.
Quigley said he didn’t yet know how much the operation would cost.
Both sides appeared to have compromised. Washington had originally wanted to repair the
plane and fly it home.
China refused that option and instead suggested that the plane, which is about the size
of a Boeing 737 commercial jet, be cut into pieces and crated home — which would make
it impossible to return the dlrs 80 million aircraft to service.
Pentagon officials said the private Antonov planes owned by companies in Russia and
Ukraine were necessary because China refused to allow a U.S. military plane to come for
the crippled aircraft.
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