The United States will hire at least one giant Soviet-designed cargo plane to carry its crippled surveillance aircraft out of China but the operation could take weeks, US officials said today.
Spokesmen at the US Defense and State Departments said Washington had agreed to China's demand that the EP-3E aircraft, damaged in an April 1st collision with a Chinese fighter jet, be disassembled and shipped from a military airfield on Hainan Island rather than repaired and flown out.
In a further sign of bruised US-China relations over the collision, China said today it had barred a US military ship from visiting Hong Kong this week.
Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm Craig Quigley said experts from the US Navy's Pacific Command would go to China this week to discuss how the EP-3E would be removed.