Kadena Air Base preparing to aid in
efforts to return EP-3 from China
From Stripes and wire reports
KADENA AIR BASE, Okinawa — Personnel are preparing the air base
to be the “final staging area” in the return of the EP-3E spy plane from China
now that U.S. and Chinese negotiators have ironed out technical details for the return,
base officials said.
Kadena will be ready to support the recovery efforts of the EP-3
aircraft, said a Kadena official who asked not to be identified. “Whatever we are
asked to do, we’ll make it happen.”
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 chill in U.S.-Chinese
relations.
The two governments announced agreement Thursday on a plan to
disassemble the plane for shipment to the United States aboard a Russian-made, chartered
private aircraft.
“This is a fairly complicated procedure, but it’s not
unprecedented by any stretch,” Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. Craig Quigley said at a
weekly news briefing.
Since the 1960s, the Navy has taken apart P-3C patrol aircraft and
converted them into EP-3 spy planes, Quigley said. He estimated the first piece of the
plane will not be flown out of China for several weeks.
The agreement finally clears the way for the surveillance plane to be
transported from Hainan island off southern China, where it made an emergency landing
April 1 after colliding with a Chinese fighter that had been monitoring it.
The agreement will have the aircraft broken down into four major
parts —the two wings, the fuselage and the tail assembly — with the pieces to be
flown home aboard one or more Antonov 124 cargo planes, Quigley said.
The collision and China’s 11-day detention of the flight crew
caused the worst tensions between the United States and China since a U.S. warplane flying
for NATO bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in the 1999 air war over Yugoslavia. The
Pentagon said the embassy was targeted mistakenly.
China expressed hope that ties with Washington now can be patched up.
“China and the U.S. have solved the plane incident,” said
Sun Yuxi, a Foreign Ministry spokesman. “The crewmembers 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 cargo plane will bring the pieces of the spy plane back
to an as-yet-undetermined location for reassembly.
The Antonov, which Quigley described as the largest cargo aircraft in
the world, will be chartered from a private company.
The Pentagon would like to hire two.
Along with a four-member U.S. assessment team already in China, a
fifth engineer specializing in runways was to arrive soon to determine how much weight can
be borne by the Hainan runway where the plane landed, Quigley said. The airport normally
is used for 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.
The crew, and equipment needed for the project such as cranes and
jacks, could begin arriving at the airport around next week.
Engineers and technicians from the plane’s manufacturer,
Lockheed Martin Corp., will do the work.
Quigley said he does not know how much the operation will cost.
Dismantling and sending the plane home represents “about a
month’s worth of work,” he said.
“Ultimately, the components would be refurbished, the plane
would be reassembled, and it would go back into regular use.”
Both sides appear to have compromised.
Washington originally wanted to repair the plane and fly it home.
China refused that option and instead suggested that the plane, about the size of a Boeing
737 commercial jet, be cut into pieces and crated home, which would make it impossible to
return the $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.
China accuses the U.S. plane of causing the accident and held the
24-member crew on Hainan until President Bush approved a letter expressing regret over the
loss of the Chinese pilot and the plane’s unauthorized landing on Hainan.
U.S. officials accused the Chinese pilot of recklessly flying his more agile F-8
fighter into the lumbering, propeller-driven surveillance plane in international airspace.
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