OAK HARBOR, Wash. — On Day 1 of their captivity, the crew of the crippled Navy surveillance plane stepped onto Chinese soil to find startled soldiers wielding weapons. By Day 11, the crew's anxiety had given way to tedium. In between stretched long hours of interrogations and uncertainty relieved by card games and skits to keep up morale.
Still sleep-deprived and wrung out from Saturday's welcome home celebrations at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, members of the EP-3 electronic monitoring plane on Sunday detailed their captivity on China's Hainan island and what information their captors attempted to extract from them.
For the Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday April 17, 2001 Home Edition Part A Part A Page 3 Metro Desk 1 inches; 27 words Type of Material: Correction
Surveillance plane--A story Monday about the crippled U.S. surveillance plane forced to land in China made an incorrect reference to the type of aircraft. The Navy EP-3 is a turboprop plane.
The plane, one of only a dozen such craft in the U.S. fleet, is a great prize that the 24-member crew sought to keep from the Chinese. Even as the pilots were struggling to land the sophisticated craft, there was concern that the Chinese might dispatch fighters to shoot it down.
The crew sent more than a dozen mayday calls on the international distress frequency.
"We were letting them know, 'We have a major emergency, and we need to land right away,' " Lt. Patrick Honeck told reporters Sunday. The Chinese maintain that they received no such calls, but Honeck said, "We sort of think they did--they had a pretty large group of people to meet us."
Once on the ground, Lt. Shane Osborn, the mission commander, was first off the plane.
"They told us not to move and not to touch anything," he said of the military personnel who met the plane.
"It wasn't a time to make a stand. We were unarmed. They're armed. So they have the advantage," Osborn recalled Sunday on ABC-TV's "This Week."
The crew followed Osborn off the $80-million Navy jet, which remains in Chinese custody, and they were herded onto a bus parked on the tarmac. They waited there while Chinese military officials milled around the plane and talked on cell phones. Crew members said their impression was that the Chinese were as startled to be in possession of an American spy plane and its crew as the Navy fliers were shocked to be standing on Chinese soil.
"I'm not sure they knew what to do with us," Osborn told ABC. "We sat on the bus, and they let four people go at a time to the restroom, and then we just kept requesting to be able to talk to our ambassador or chain of command so we could let everyone know we were safe."
