U.S. Team Arrives in China to Inspect Plane

A team of U.S. technicians arrived Tuesday on Hainan island to check out a stranded American spy plane and find a way to get it out of China.

The five inspectors arrived on Hainan, off the southern Chinese coast, one month to the day after the U.S. Navy EP-3 surveillance aircraft made an emergency landing there following a midair collision with a Chinese fighter jet.

The technicians, from Lockheed Martin Corp., are expected to assess the damage to the crippled plane over the next day or two as the first step toward its recovery. U.S. officials have said the aircraft is too damaged to fly.

The April 1 accident over the South China Sea ripped off the nose cone of the $80-million turboprop plane and damaged two propellers. Its 24-member crew landed the craft at Hainan’s Lingshui military air base after a harrowing descent--then wound up in detention on the island for 11 days.

The pilot of the F-8 fighter jet, Lt. Cmdr. Wang Wei, died in the crash. The Chinese government has eulogized him as a national martyr and maintains that the EP-3 caused the collision, an explanation the U.S. rejects.

Since the American crew members’ release, the fate of the hobbled aircraft has been the major sticking point for Washington. U.S. defense officials nearly broke off subsequent talks in Beijing after the Chinese refused to discuss the issue during the first round of negotiations.

“The airplane is sort of a corrosive element right now in our relationship” with China, said outgoing U.S. Ambassador Joseph W. Prueher. “It’s a reminder of a hard spot, and we need to clean that up and get on with things.”

Prueher, a retired Navy admiral, was the chief U.S. negotiator during the standoff between Beijing and Washington over the detention of the American crew.

A revival of Sino-U.S. diplomatic ties, now at their lowest point in two years, will have to do without Prueher’s services. He ended his 17-month tenure as ambassador Tuesday, flying back to the U.S. with his wife, Suzanne, hours before the U.S. inspection team arrived.

President Bush has appointed a former fraternity brother from Yale, Clark “Sandy” Randt Jr., to succeed Prueher. Randt, a onetime U.S. commercial attache in Beijing, is a business lawyer based in Hong Kong who speaks fluent Mandarin.

If confirmed by the Senate, Randt will inherit a troubled bilateral relationship rocked not just by the spy plane standoff but also Bush’s decision last week to sell advanced weapons to Taiwan, the island Beijing considers lost territory to be recovered by force if necessary.

But Beijing’s decision to allow U.S. inspectors to travel to Hainan was a signal that the Communist regime wants to get Sino-U.S. relations on a more even keel. The announcement Sunday night, while restating the Chinese position that the American EP-3 “rammed” the fighter jet, steered clear of the heated nationalistic rhetoric that has marked many of Beijing’s statements about the accident.