China's hi-tech military disaster Times/UK

[TexasLawyer]

The Sunday Times - World

The Sunday Times June 11, 2006

China's hi-tech military disaster
Michael Sheridan, Far East Correspondent
Bid to copy Israeli electronics kills experts

A DULL boom shook the misty bamboo forests of Guangde county, 125 miles southwest of Shanghai, last Sunday, and a plume of smoke rose in the sky, causing Chinese villagers to look up in alarm from their tasks.

Within 24 hours China officially admitted that a “military aircraft” had crashed, that President Hu Jintao had ordered an investigation and that state honours would be bestowed on the victims.

Security teams sealed off the area, carting away the charred remains of 40 people and collecting wreckage with painstaking care. It looked like a routine military accident.

In fact the crash would reverberate all the way to Washington and Tel Aviv, revealing details of a covert Chinese espionage effort to copy Israeli technology in an attempt to match the United States in any future air and sea battle.

<snip>

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2220162,00.html

[tocqueville]

1. this story is not clear

it's one thing to build an AWAC that can fly and another to pack it with electronic devices that work. Obviously, if the story is correct, it is the construction of the airplane which isn't good enough (aeronautics) and that has nothing to do with the spying devices as the report sounds to imply.

[bemildred]

2. No. Not clear. Rather imaginative, I thought it was.

Mountains of supposition built on almost nothing at all. One might almost think this fellow was trying to stir up suspicions between the Russians and Chinese ...

[Kagemusha]

3. Uh yeah, the Chinese doing this isn't exactly secret.

It's been long public that the US military is not happy with Israel for providing the electronics for this aircraft.

I don't want to speculate on the possible causes of the crash. It crashed. Life goes on.

[TexasLawyer]

4. The writer doesn't know what happened

and neither do the Chinese apparently, hence the investigation. The article posits a spy v. spy scenario given past successes at infiltration.

I can think of plenty of AWAC-looking "equipment" that could affect the plane's flight-- maybe some of the equipment had been rigged to emit poison gas at a certain altitude, had C-4 explosives, and so on.

Spies and saboteurs can be very enterprising.

[Downtown Hound]

5. A lot of cold war thinking and fantasy in this

Who knows? But military accidents happen all the time. The rest of this is just speculation without facts.

[Tempest]

6. Was China's aircraft based on the Osprey?

How many of those U.S. military albatross' have crashed and killed U.S. soldiers?