A Chinese fighter jet came within 10 feet of a US Air Force B-52 bomber flying over the South China Sea on Tuesday, according to the US military.
The Chinese pilot “flew in an unsafe and unprofessional manner, demonstrated poor airmanship by closing with uncontrolled excessive speed, flying below, in front of, and within 10 feet of the B-52, putting both aircraft in danger of collision,” US Indo-Pacific Command said in a Thursday statement. “We are concerned this pilot was unaware of how close he came to causing a collision.”
News of the latest Chinese intercept comes as President Joe Biden is expected to speak with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi when he visits the White House on Friday, CNN reported on Thursday. It is not clear whether the meeting will be a formal discussion or a more informal meet and greet. Wang is also expected to meet with Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday and national security adviser Jake Sullivan on Friday.
Presumably the pilot would have been ordered to do this. To what end? Why?
Yes China, we know you want Taiwan back. Either commit to solid action or don’t. This bizarre behaviour just risks lives and expensive aircraft.
Seriously, what’s the point?
They explain why in the article.
From China’s point of view, the US regularly sends planes thousands of miles from its coast to go to harass China. They view it as the equivalent of when an other kid starts waving their hands in your face and saying, “I’m not touching you. I’m not touching you.” They feinting back.
Both the freedom of navigation exercise and the response are messages. The US is saying, “We can project force all the way to your front door. If push comes to shove, we can start blowing up your shit.” China is essentially responding with, “You got yours and I got mine. You wanna fuck around and find out?”
That’s what it boils down to. It’s an extremely angry conversation between superpowers.
Shouldn’t all bombers be flying with fighter escorts? How did a Chinese fighter plane manage to get so close to it?
What difference would that make? They’re not going to shoot it down.
Why not? The Chinese fighter jet got too close. Had a fighter been following that B52 that Chinese fighter wouldn’t have been able to get close, because our fighter jet would shoot him down
If nothing else, the fighter could lock their weapons at the Chinese fighter jet and make them sweat a bit.
As I understand it, a “weapons lock” is mostly about deliberately pointing your detectors at a target. The target may notice a spike in radar sweeps but they don’t actually know what the other vessel is doing with that radar information.
It’s kind of like when someone starts staring at you really hard. You get a feeling that they’re probably up to something but you don’t actually know if they’re coming to take a swing at you or if it’s just RBF.
From what I’ve read it’s something that happens fairly regularly. If you want to warn an other military vehicle without escalating to warning shots you flash some targeting sensors at them.
My guess is that the fighter and bomber were targeting each other and that a bunch of land based radars on the Chinese coast joined the party too.
edit: looks like I was wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_lock-on It seems that “lock on” as we know it from movies and video games isn’t a thing with modern military equipment. I suspect the signal intelligence folks still have some thing that tells a pilot, “data suggests that someone may be planning to shoot you”.
Act of war. They don’t do that. That doesn’t happen in real life, that scene from Top Gun was for dramatic effect. They never do that unless they are actively engaged to kill.
I think the US government considers active radar jamming to be an act of war but I’m not aware of any statements or treaties that would make targeting itself an act of war. As I understand it the US and China do it to each other fairly regularly.
The Chinese military is severely lacking in accountability and professionalism. The pilots think this kind of flying projects skill, when really it shows their incompetence.
This is completely not true. It does not show incompetence whatsoever. Quite the opposite actually. Dangerous, reckless, unprofessional, yes. But at those speeds, it takes skill to get that close, and not be pulled into the other plane and crash, when the other plane is not actively participating in the stunt. That’s why the Thunderbirds and Blue Angels, and every other stunt team in the world practice for 100’s of hours on this. It is not easy to do in any case. Bernoulli’s principle makes it get more difficult the faster you are moving. That is why a chinese pilot crashed into an E3 years ago, when he tried to pull the same crap.
A professional would recognize the slim margin for error and numerous things that could go wrong and just not do this type of crazy stunt at all
You’re saying this as if the pilot was just hotdogging and was totally ignorant of the risks. That’s pretty unlikely.
The Chinese government has been pretty clear about what they think of “freedom of navigation exercises”. If Chinese bombers were flying around the coast of the US you can be damn sure we’d be scrambling fighters to crawl up their butts too.
Those pilots got orders and carried them out successfully. You may disagree with the orders but it’s silly to accuse the pilot of lack of professionalism.
Lol… All the dumb downvotes these days… At least reply after a downvote to explain why You downvoted in the first place. Annoying 😞 but funny 😂🤣
Edit: how’d I get more downvotes then the messages below? 👇 🤣😂
