Free Republic

A US surveillance aircraft has flown over South Korea, an aviation tracker said Wednesday, on an apparent mission to monitor North Korea just days after the communist nation fired what are believed to be two short-range ballistic missiles. The US Navy's EP-3E was spotted in skies above South Korea on Tuesday, Aircraft Spots tweeted. The operation came two days after North Korea fired two projectiles from the eastern coastal city of Wonsan toward the East Sea, marking the fourth major weapons test the North has conducted this year. The United States flew the same type of plane over the peninsula...

Venezuelan Fighter ‘Aggressively Shadowed’ U.S. EP-3E Over Caribbean By: Megan Eckstein July 21, 2019 8:32 PM U.S. Southern Command announced that a Venezuelan fighter harassed a U.S. Navy surveillance plane in the Caribbean Sea on Friday over international waters. In a pair of tweets, SOUTHCOM wrote that a “Venezuela SU-30 Flanker ‘aggressively shadowed’ a U.S. EP-3E aircraft at an unsafe distance July 19, jeopardizing the crew & aircraft.” Noting the ongoing relationship between Nicolás Maduro’s government in Caracas and Russia – in contrast to the U.S.-backed Juan Guaidó regime that claimed power in January after an election that Maduro says...

Colin Powell, veteran soldier and bureaucratic infighter, had the makings of an outstanding secretary of state. Notice of his potential came with the handling of the spy plane incident with China a few months after the new Republican administration had taken office. The mid-air collision between an EP-3E reconnaissance aircraft and an F-8 fighter over the South China Sea threatened a major confrontation between a President who had spoken of strategic competition with Beijing during the election campaign, and a Communist Party only too happy to bang the nationalist drum to shore up its legitimacy. In the event, despite the...

<p>A Navy report says a Chinese F-8 jet pilot was to blame for the midair collision over the South China Sea that nearly killed the crew of a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft two years ago.</p> <p>The report of an investigation of the incident by the Pacific Fleet judge advocate's office also states that the crew of the aircraft, which was forced to make an emergency landing at a Chinese military base, was unable to destroy all of the secrets on the electronic-warfare aircraft and that China likely obtained some classified information from it.</p>