Bush's Big Test: Saving Face

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When satellite photographs showed the plane partly covered in tarps--the better to hide the work of prying Chinese engineers--it confirmed the Administration's fears. While the EP-3E is an old plane, a model that began flying in 1969, its electronic guts are up-to-the-minute. No EP-3E has ever been shot down or captured, even though the "flying pig," as it is called, is a long-range, slow-flying unarmed aircraft. "The most important thing to the Chinese on that airplane was the data we had collected earlier that day," says Norman Polmar, an independent Navy expert. "That would tell them which of their systems is vulnerable to interception--Are we able to intercept telephone conversations from Chinese naval headquarters to ships? Are we able to intercept radar transmissions at certain frequencies?--that's what the Chinese want to know."

It was bad enough that the Chinese were holding the crew and autopsying the plane; then Jiang stepped forward to charge that the U.S. was fully responsible for the crash and owed China an apology. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer flatly ruled out any such thing, and not just because being a superpower means never having to say you're sorry. The U.S. was more than willing to apologize for accidentally bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade two years ago. But in the case of this collision, the near instant consensus among U.S. military pilots was that if anyone was at fault, it was the Chinese.

"It's like a speedboat and a sailboat," said a Navy pilot. "The smaller, more powerful guy has the responsibility to avoid the bigger, slower one." Yet recently, as the U.S. stepped up surveillance flights in response to China's buildup in the area, the Chinese pilots had become more aggressive. "Sometimes they're so close you can see their faces," David Cecka, Aviation Electronics Technician 2nd Class onboard the downed plane, had told his mother. It got so bad that U.S. officials complained. "We went to the Chinese and said, 'Your aircraft are not intercepting in a professional manner. There is a safety issue here,'" recalls Admiral Dennis Blair, head of the U.S. Pacific Command. "It's not normal practice to play bumper cars in the air."