U.S. Plane in China Full of Electronics, Antennas
WASHINGTON, Apr 3, 2001 -- (Reuters) The United States is anxious for China to return a Navy surveillance plane stuffed with sophisticated electronics and hidden antennas because it could give Beijing insight into what data was of interest and how it was collected, U.S. defense experts said on Monday.
An EP-3 surveillance aircraft made an emergency landing over the weekend on China's Hainan Island after a midair collision with a Chinese fighter jet, which crashed.
President George W. Bush demanded on Monday that China return the plane "without further tampering."
The United States is concerned that if China has extensive access to the most sophisticated eavesdropping plane the Navy has, it could determine what type of information the U.S. military is able to gather.
The Navy has about a dozen EP-3 planes. While the body of the aircraft is relatively dated -- the model first joined the fleet in 1969 -- its interior is outfitted with state-of-the-art listening equipment.
The four-engine turboprop plane is used for eavesdropping. It collects radio, radar and other transmissions from ships or military posts on land, sweeping up communications and data from the air like a vacuum.
DESTRUCTION OF MATERIALS
The 24-member crew was trained to destroy sensitive materials in the event of an unplanned landing. But there has been no communication with the crew since shortly after the landing, so U.S. defense officials said they were uncertain whether all the top-secret material had been destroyed.
The last communication from the crew of the surveillance plane indicated that armed Chinese soldiers were boarding the aircraft, U.S. officials said on condition of anonymity.
"All of our military aircraft that have sensitive equipment and information on board have instructions to the pilot and crew about what steps to take if you fear either you're going to crash or land during an emergency like this in an area where you fear that information may be compromised," one U.S. defense official told Reuters.
"It's called emergency destruction procedures," the official said on condition of anonymity.
"That said, it's not at all certain that in an emergency situation like this that the crew would have the time to complete that process before they had to land," he said.
If China inspects the plane, the United States is in danger of losing "the knowledge and the capabilities of the equipment that the plane carries," Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. Craig Quigley said. He declined to give further details.
CAPTURING SIGNALS
The other defense official said the EP-3 aircraft's mission was "capturing what's being transmitted in the electromagnetic spectrum, whether that's communications, whether that's data, whether that's other electronic signals."
The plane has a nearly 100-foot (30-meter) wing span, is about 106 feet (32 meters) long and has 24 seats. It is capable of flying for more than 12 hours and has a range of more than 3,000 nautical miles.
"These planes do not routinely fly into combat zones. It's usually offshore, so one would not expect them to fall into unfriendly hands," a U.S. official said.
John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a not-for-profit defense policy organization, said the EP-3 aircraft could pick up any radio or radar transmission within a radius of several hundred miles.
The plane has many antennas, mostly hidden from view at a distance, in areas at its bottom, back and front.
It probably has a signal processing computer and a database system that can determine the type of a particular signal -- whether it emanates from a ship or another source, for example -- Pike said.
Chinese access to the plane would help "them understand what we're listening to and suggest to them where they need to have better security," Pike said.
"This airplane is basically just stuffed with electronics," Pike said. "Short of blowing up the airplane, there's unavoidably a limit as to what they (crew members) could destroy," he said.
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