Spy plane to make pit stop in Hawai'i
Advertiser Staff and News Services
A U.S. Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane will come home in pieces from China this week, marking the end of an incident that shook U.S.-Chinese relations, a Navy spokeswoman said.
Associated Press
A chartered Antonov-124 cargo plane will carry the Navy plane on a multi-hop, 20-hour flight from Hainan Island, China, through Manila and Honolulu to Georgia, said Lt. Cmdr. Cate Mueller.
A Russian Antonov 124 cargo plane sits on the tarmac at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa. The plane is carrying pieces of a U.S. Navy surveillance plane that was stranded on China's Hainan Island back to U.S. soil.
The Russian-made cargo plane, carrying the dissected EP-3's fuselage, was expected to leave China early this morning Hawai'i time, officials said, and arrive at Hickam Air Force Base later this afternoon for an overnight crew rest stop.
The EP-3 is scheduled to arrive Thursday at Lockheed Martin Corp.'s plant in Marietta, Ga., where it will be reassembled over a period of months.
By last Thursday, the recovery team had removed all four engine covers and cut the wings from the fuselage, the U.S. Pacific Command said on its Internet site.
The international incident began April 1, when the EP-3 took off from Kadena on an intelligence-gathering flight in international air space along the Chinese coast. Two Chinese F-8 fighter jets intercepted it, and one of them collided with the propeller-driven U.S. plane over the South China Sea.
Badly damaged, the EP-3 made an emergency landing at a Chinese air base on Hainan Island.
The 24 members of the crew were released 11 days later, after tense negotiations that were resolved when the Bush administration said it was "very sorry" for the death of the Chinese fighter pilot and the emergency landing.
But negotiations about whether and how to return the plane continued for several weeks. After the Chinese government rejected the idea of flying out the airplane, a team from Lockheed Martin arrived in mid-June to begin removing its wings and horizontal tail, to take the engines off the wings, and to drain all fluids and fuel.
The Navy and Lockheed Martin are still negotiating over the cost of reassembling the plane, Mueller said.
"We expect it to take eight to 12 months to make it airworthy," she said. Then, the plane will get a new, upgraded set of aviation electronics that will take several more months to install, she said.
