The Rest Is Classified - 175. How China Downed a US Spy Plane (Ep 1)

Episode Date: July 12, 2026

What happens when a Chinese Fighter jet crashes into a US spy plane? The result is death, hostages and a major crisis with lessons for what could spark a war today. Listen as David and Gordon tell the infamous story of the Hainan Island Incident.  ------------------- THE REST IS CLASSIFIED LIVE 2026 at The Rest Is Fest: Buy your tickets ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to see David and Gordon live on stage at London’s Southbank Centre on 4 September: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/the-rest-is-classified-live/⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Sign-up for our free newsletter where producer Becki takes you behind the scenes of the show: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign⁠-up⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Join the Declassified Club to go deeper into the world of espionage with exclusive Q&As, interviews with top intelligence insiders, regular livestreams, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, and weekly deep dives into original spy stories. Members also get curated reading lists, special book discounts, prize draws, and access to our private chat community. Just go to ⁠⁠therestisclassified.com⁠ or join on Apple Podcasts. ------------------- Get a 10% discount on business PCs, printers and accessories using the code TRIC10. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://HP.com/CLASSIFIED⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more information. T&C's apply. ------------------- Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@restisclassified⁠ Video Editor: Joe Pettit Social Producer: Emma Jackson Assistant Producer: Alfie Rowe Producer: Becki Hills Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books. Join the declassified club at the rest is classified.com. What happens when a Chinese fighter jet crashes into a U.S. spy plane? The results is deaf, hostages, and a major crisis with lessons for what could spark a war today. Well, welcome to The Rest is Classified. I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Corrack.

And in this thrilling two-part series, Gordon, that we're starting, we are going to look at an incredibly dramatic incident that happened 25 years ago over the South China Sea. But it is an incident that I think has real lessons for the very tense world that we're living in today, not just with China, but also with Russia. And it shows the risks of how really accidents. that come out of nowhere can spark major crises. That's right. This is known as the Hainan incident. We'll come to Y shortly. And it happened 25 years ago at the start of a new presidency, that of George W. Bush, spring 2001. It involves an accident, a crash of two aircraft, one of which was a U.S. spy plane.

The other was a Chinese fighter jet. And we're going to look in, I think, quite a lot of detail. about that incident, about the accident, which in itself leads effectively to a hostage situation for US Air Crew, which needed to be resolved diplomatically, but certainly also does have lessons for today. This episode is brought to you by HP. In intelligence work, it's rarely the obvious problem that causes failure. It's the overlooked detail or the flawed nobody quite solved. The kind of vulnerability, intelligence services look for. And running a business is the same, especially when you're building or growing a team. It's the risks you can't see or don't understand.

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That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home. So what I think is so relevant about this today is that the incident we're going to discuss it comes out of a practice of fighter jets intercepting or buzzing other airplanes,

including spy planes, and that is a practice that is very much still happening today. It's happening today over the skies of Europe between NATO jets and Russian planes. It's still happening around China. And there is a lot of tension in this practice. The stakes are really high, as we'll see. And the spiral from one of these accidents to a much more significant, wider conflict is not a very long spiral, is it? No, not at all. And I think that those risks are there and are very real.

I think it gets us into a really interesting area about spy planes and some of the history of these spy planes and some of the incidents and the dramatic incidents around them. We'll be talking a bit about that in this series, but also a bit more in our new off-air segment, which will be in our Restis Classified newsletter. So do sign up for that or you can scan the QR code on the video if you're watching the video. But yeah, it is interesting because I think if war were to break out today, it could spring from exactly the kind of incident we're talking about where you have an accident of two planes or maybe even two boats at the moment, two ships in the South China Sea, getting too close and a mistake, a collision, and then a crisis. So it's probably worth setting up the mission that we're going to talk about, which of course occurs as. we said in 2001. The setting for this is the South China Sea. This is, was then and still is, one of the kind of flashpoints in global geopolitics. You have multiple countries in the space who have overlapping contradictory territorial claims. It's rich, I think you could say with

boundary disputes. There's something called the nine dash line, which is a, a line on maps that are produced by China that show a line, quite literally, with nine dashes, that encircles the South China Sea. And it is through this line, the Chinese claim that they have maritime rights over about 90% of the sea and its shipping routes and its mineral reserves. And that claim overlaps with the claims of a lot of other countries in the region, such as Vietnam, such as Indonesia, the Philippines. China claims that some of the islands, the Paracel Islands, for example, belong to China, and therefore the airspace above it, the sea lanes around it are theirs, and it's not,

this is really important. This is not international airspace or international waters. This is Chinese territorial waters. And therefore, part of China, the U.S., as many of these other, Southeast days and countries do, maintains that this is not the case. And so there are these freedom of navigation missions, ships often, that really go through these waters to demonstrate that point that this is not Chinese territory. But there's also, this relates very specifically to the story we're telling today, and also spy planes that fly in and around this region

in what we consider to be international airspace, but the Chinese consider to be their own. That's right. And one of these spy planes back in 2001 is something called an EP3. It's a spy plane, but a pretty unusual one. I think in your head you might be thinking something incredibly high-tech. That's not it. It's a big, slow aircraft, isn't it? About the size of a Boeing 737. It's actually a four-engine prop, a propeller airliner, which is flying, therefore, for slow, heavy, but inside it's got spy gear. And I guess it's worth explaining, isn't it? Why people fly these spy planes and what they're for?

I mean, it's a form of Signals Intelligence Collection. It's a platform to collect Signals Intelligence, isn't it, David? Yeah, it is a slow-boving vacuum for signals intelligence collection. And that's looking for radar signals, getting an idea of what coverage the Chinese have in the region, how the Chinese operate, you know, the EP3 or any sort of aerial platform for signals intelligence collection. When they're conducting these kind of missions, they're basically soaking up, you know, all of the radio transmissions, the air defense signatures from the ground. Lots of things that you actually, you know, you think in our sort of interconnected world, oh, can't you do a lot of this from space via satellite? No, the geographic proximity matters.

You can't do a lot of this via satellite. You certainly couldn't do it in 2001. And because it has so many different sensors and collection platforms on it, it's got, and this is also being a very important element of the story, it's not just a couple pilots. It's a really big crew that is about 24 people, six of them at the air crew, and then there's 18 people who are the signals intelligence collectors, the technical specialists who are collecting all this information on behalf of the NSA, the National Security Agency. That's right. And on this mission we're going to talk about, April 1st, 2001. It's being led by U.S. Navy lieutenant, lieutenant, if you're American, Shane Osborne. Shane Oldsbourne's just started as a commander of these missions, spring 2001.

He's only 26 years old, and many of the crew on board are only 19 or 20, so they're really young. You interviewed him, right? Yeah, I interviewed Shane a couple of years ago. I mean, he can still, and what we'll hear about this incident, some of it comes from other accounts, but a lot comes from his memory, because if you were commanding an incident like this, he can still vividly, you know, 20, 25 years later, remember exactly what happened that day on April 1st. But it didn't come out the blue, it's worth saying, because there'd been some back and forth with China at that time. The US had stepped up the number of missions it's flying off China,

so in international airspace. And then China has stepped up its intercepts. So that's when it sends out its fighter jets to meet these planes. And we should say this is, I mean, this is something which happens today. It happens all the time, doesn't it, where fighter jets are scrambled, they go up to basically escort a company, take a look at the aircraft, track them. Usually they come out, they intercept, track it for a bit, break away and then leave. It's kind of making a point, isn't it? There is a long and rich historical precedent for these kind of flights, right? This is, this go back to the early days of the Cold War and you have, you have dozens, if not hundreds of examples of these. And normally,

nothing happens, right? Normally, it's business as usual. But in this case, you know, sometimes, for example, Chinese planes would call U.S. air crews on international frequencies and they would, for example, tell them, you know, okay, you're in Chinese airspace. Get out. And then the U.S. crews would say, nope, we're in international airspace. We're still going. And there's kind of this fruitless back and forth that's been going on between the two countries because of the territorial dispute. But it had been getting a bit more tense in the run-up, and they'd seen some of these Chinese planes come up from a base, which is on Hainan Island, which juts out into the South China Seas, and planes on that base had been

coming up and doing something called flat-hating, which is getting close to one of these spy planes and buzzing it and almost buffeting it, so creating turbulence around it to shake it. Which I think does beg the question, given the risk, why why is the US doing this? Is it just to prove the point on the territorial boundary? What's the value that the signals intelligence collection on this plane can deliver? There's a lot you can get from this. I mean, understanding how Chinese radar operates, how they scramble their planes, what signatures they use, what encrypted communications do they use when the Chinese pilots are communicating with their base. All of that is really useful.

military intelligence, particularly if you ever were to come into conflict with China, that's the kind of stuff you want to do. You want to know the air defense signatures, don't you? You want to know what frequencies they work on. You want to know how they lock on to you to some extent. All of that kind of activity, the emissions which are coming from different Chinese military assets, collecting, scooping all that up in that giant vacuum cleaner, as you put it, that's really, really helpful. I mean, you might also be looking for submarines, which might be operating in the South China Seas, looking for their emissions. So you're trying to understand how does the Chinese military operate? How does it respond to you? How does it spot you? How quickly does it spot you? All of that, I mean, is really useful intelligence.

And so then on April 1st, 2001, the EP3, that flying vacuum cleaner that Shane Osborne is piloting is coming to the end of one of these missions. And they're based, we should say, out of Okinawa and Japan. So they're preparing. They've done the mission. They've scooped up what they need to scoop up. And they're getting ready for the two hour flight back home. They're flag at about 22,000 feet. The autopilot is on. And this seems like just another day in the office. Yeah. And they've done some missions previous days where they've been intercepted and the Chinese pilots had come pretty close. I mean, so close that the Chinese pilot and Shane Osborne can actually see each other. And there is this. sense that the Chinese pilots are becoming more aggressive. And Oldsport knows that these Chinese naval pilots, and their naval pilots rather than Air Force pilots from China, didn't train in formation flying. So they would come out and they would stay a bid off his wings, but they have quite a hard time because, of course, the fighter jets fly much faster than the prop planes. So actually, it takes a bit of skill to stay off the wing of a prop plane long enough to, you know,

make them know you're there. And on this day, Shane sees the Chinese pilot coming towards him. He calls up the navigator on the EP3 to confirm they're still in international airspace. They want to make sure they've not wandered into what's considered by them Chinese airspace. They don't have a GPS or anything. So it's not very sophisticated, but he's told yes, you're in international airspace. And now this Chinese pilot is coming at him. But what's really interesting is we can actually have a look at the Chinese side and understand a little bit about that. Yeah, so who is the Chinese pilot? And what is the view on, you know, sort of these American missions as seen from Beijing?

Yeah, because the view from Beijing is that they've seen the U.S. flights get more frequent. They think they're getting closer to what really are Chinese territorial waters. So it's, you know, these planes tend to skirt the edge of the someone's territorial waters or space. That's the point. You want to get as close as you can without crossing over it. China had said to the US, you know, this is, please stop this reconnaissance activity. So they're getting frustrated as well. But actually, this is really about one particular pilot. So on April 1st, an alert siren goes off at the Lingshui Air Base on Hainan Island. Hynan, as I said, is a big island in South China seas. Home to the military, also signals intelligence base. Two pilots scramble. One of them is

called the Wang Wei. Now he and the other pilot is wingman head from the duty room to board their two Jiet fighter jets. Now these are not particularly sophisticated fighter jets at the time. They're kind of copies of Russian mid-21 jets. Now Wang is 33 years old and a top Navy pilot. He'd come from a working class background in China, always wanted to be a pilot, joined initially without his parents' permission, not a rich family. The first new clothes he owned, it said, where his military uniform previously just had secondhand clothes. He's got a wife and young son back home, and he takes a bicycle to get from home to the base that day. But he was a top pilot.

But what I think is interesting is that he is the Chinese equivalent of a top gun pilot. And I think he's got that maverick top gun attitude. You're a top gun fan, David? Oh, yeah. I like to reenact the shirtless volleyball match. on an annual basis after watching the movie. It's a McCloskey family summer tradition. Yeah, of course I loved.

I love, who doesn't love Top Gun, Gordon? It's practically un-American to not love Top Gun, I think. Yeah. So I'm glad you share a similar patriotic taste. I've always considered you the goose to my maverick, Gordon. I hope it ends better for you and for us on the podcast. But Wang is a Top Gun pilot and he's got that Maverick. He's got the hot dog pilot attitude.

He likes to push the boundaries. He likes to do barrel rolls, things to show off. It can be a bit impatient, bit hot-headed. Doesn't want to be a senior officer, just wants to fly the best plane. Just like Maverick. That's just like Maverick. He's a Chinese version of Maverick. So he's really known as the Hot Dog Pilot.

I mean, he'd even done this thing where he'd put his email address in the window of his cockpit at one point and flown by an EP3 and shown it to them, basically saying, you know, you can get in touch. So he and his wingman, these two Chinese planes are flying out towards Shane Osborne's EP3, and then this is where the Chinese accounts, the American accounts, are going to differ as to what happens next. But the result will be disaster. Well, maybe there, let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll see how, what could have been, a routine day in the air turns into death, catastrophe, and an international hostage crisis. We'll see after the break.

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Hello and welcome to Doing It Anyway, a brand new series from Goalhanger. I'm Katty Kay. I've spent years studying the science and art of confidence, writing books about how we can close the confidence gap between men and women, and talking to experts and younger women about how to class it on. Confidence means taking risks, acknowledging your fears and, well, doing it anyway. In this series, I'll be talking to psychologists, entrepreneurs and business leaders to unpack how you can rethink challenges and grow your own confidence. We'll talk about how to spot the difference between confidence and competence, how to deal with office politics and stolen

credit and, yes, handling rejection, and ultimately how you can become a better leader, teammate, Yes, a better person. Doing it anyway with Katty Kay every Friday, wherever you get your podcast. Well, welcome back. It's the spring of 2001, and we are over the South China Sea, and a Chinese fighter jet piloted by Wang Wei is approaching the US EP3 spy plane, and he's coming up on that plane from the rear left. And Wang comes really close, so he's about 10 feet away.

I mean, I just still find that extraordinary, that you can be that close on two planes, 10 feet. And he actually salutes the US crew. So it's not a kind of adversarial relationship. It's a kind of, you know, joking, joshing relationship. And then he falls back. Then he comes back a second time. This time he's even closer.

Then he falls back. And then he comes for a third time close. And there is this thing, as I said, where pilots do, where they bring your aircraft up under the other plane and lift. quickly in front of the plane, and then that creates an air pocket for the plane behind you, which then buffets it and shakes it up and creates turbulence. And it looks like that's what he's trying to do. And this is from Shane Osborne's account, because this time, Wang comes right underneath

the wing of the EP3 between the left two propellers, and he's two or three feet away from the propellers. and when the Chinese J8 fighter jet flies at low speed, it becomes a bit unstable and it is struggling to keep at that slow pace with the EP3. And Osborne says he could see Wang struggling to stay close. And it looks like at this point Wang makes just a tiny miscalculation of the distances. So he approaches too fast. He tries to slow down by pulling power and pitching his nose up. But that means he's coming up from underneath.

His airplane goes up and rams the left wing of the EP3. And the result is incredibly dramatic because the far left engine of the EP3 just cuts Wang's fuselage in half. It breaks the tail apart. It tears a hole through one of the ailerons on the EP3, which then has the effect of kind of turning the plane left and right, violently swinging to the left, Wang's nose cone breaks apart and then impacts the nose of the EP3 itself. And I find this remarkable. The American plane flips over and is now inverted. So Shane and the crew, I guess, are staring down into the ocean as they're continuing on with this plane starting to come apart. Yeah. I think.

goes so they're upside down and now it starts to fall. They've got no nose cone on their plane. The plane is starting to decompress. At this point, one of his crew does see a parachute go up from the Chinese jet and we'll come back later to Wang's fate. But meanwhile, on the EP3, the wind is screaming through the aircraft because it's got all these holes, got decompression. Shane Osborne is trying to hold on to the plane to keep it straight and keep the wings level. And he says he can bench nearly 400 pounds, which I think sounds like a lot. I don't think I could do that. Don't sell yourself short, Gordon.

Yeah, well, we're really a beach volleyball from you, David. That's right. That's right. It's a really manly episode, isn't it? Every episode of the rest is classified is already super manly. But this is an exceptionally, a particularly manly episode. But the point is that Shane Osborne is really, really strong. and he is having a very hard time

keeping this plane under control. And there are cables from the torn-off nose cone flapping up against his windscreen and the EP3, the plane falls upside down for nearly two miles in less than a minute. As it reaches lower altitude, the air gets thicker and he's got a bit more control to write it so he gets it the right way around

but it's still falling another 8,000 feet or so before he can get it out of the dive. And at this point, he's got two of his four engines damaged, the tail is damaged, the nose is gone, his airspeed indication is gone, he's going to lose his altitude indication. He's in a bad way. Needless to say, he's not going to make it back to Okinawa with the EP3 in that shape, because that's a two-hour flight away. The plan's not going to be able to hold together. So, I mean, I guess the other options, one is they could all bail out, I suppose, as it seems Wang Wei did. But that, I don't know. That seems really fraught over the open ocean. I mean, I think if you bail out there over the open ocean, you're going to have 24 people on the plane who are going to be spread out on like a, I mean, they reckon on a 12 mile radius in the middle of the ocean. It's going to be really hard to survive, even if you manage to land on the ocean. And then to be able to find these people, there's no guarantee because they're going to be so. dispersed. So they need to land. I mean, another option, I guess, is to ditch in the water. But this is, I

think this is, despite that one famous pilot who did it in New York, wasn't it? He did it on the Hudson. Captain Sully. Captain Sully. It's hard to do any time. I think it's very hard to do on a plane, which is falling apart. So I think Shane Osborne thinks trying to ditch in the ocean is just going to kill them all. The other option seems kind of bad too, which is landing in China. Yeah. Landing your spy plane that's been spying on the Chinese military and has just been involved in an incident, which might make it seem like you were responsible for the destruction

of this fighter jet. So landing in China also seems to be, I mean, I guess it's the only way to, it's the only way to keep the crew alive. And yet it's also exceptionally risky. I guess you get shot down as you come in to land. Yeah. I mean, because the navigator at this point says, well, Hainan is only 30 miles away. And of course, there's a runway there.

But the runway is Ling Shui Air Base, which is the exact, it's a Chinese military air base. And it's where the pilot you've just crashed into has flown from. You know that. But it's the only place. I mean, you haven't got time even to get to Vietnam or anywhere else, given the condition of the aircraft. So that is your choice, is land in China with your spy plane.

packed full of equipment designed to spy on China, or crash and die. It's not a great choice. When you spoke to Shane Osborne about this, did he think at the time that the decision was clear, that it was just they had to land in China, or was there a lot of, was there back and forth in his own mind or with other members of the air crew on the day of? Well, it's interesting because later some people will say, well, you should have ditched in the ocean. You should have destroyed the plane and, you know, bailed out, But I think his view was his first priority is actually the safety of his crew and trying to save their lives. And that is his priority.

So I don't think he has any regrets about making that decision that he's going to go, he's going to head to China. So he sends out a medea. He calls for the crew. And this is the crucial bit of the story, which will come to, which is they, he calls for the crew to start destroying the spy gear, which is on the plane. because of course it's packed full of very, very top secret spy equipment. Meanwhile, they set course for Ling Shui Air Base. The crew of the plane had been pinned to the floor, they get up, and they tear off the emergency exits of the plane to start hurling spy equipment out into the South China Sea.

But the problem is, and this is not their fault, but it doesn't seem that they've been trained on how to do this, or given the right tools or a clear inventory of, even what they have and what they should prioritize in destroying, which I guess is surprising. But maybe they just thought this was so unlikely it would ever happen that you might end up landing on enemy territory. Because I guess if you're in an embassy, I mean, you've been in embassies abroad. That is something that U.S. officials and spies think about, isn't it? What if the embassy stormed?

Well, it certainly is. And there are definitely protocols for what sort of incident triggers. the wholesale destruction of all the classified and the hard drives and all that kind of stuff, you know, versus what, for example, if an embassy, like, you know, the embassy in Damascus was overrun, right, during the Syrian Civil War. And a few people got over the walls. But there wasn't like the wholesale collapse of the compound's perimeter. And the main, the station was secured. And so, you know, my understanding is they didn't, you know, they didn't end up destroying everything in that, in that incident, right? But you're sort of starting to get close. And I think it highlights

the complexity in the moment with making these kind of decisions because, when I think about our Argo series that we did, right? When the U.S. Embassy in Tehran is overrun, the sense I get from that is that even as the embassy is being overrun, this whole, it's just, it's chaos on what gets destroyed and what doesn't. And so it does feel like this kind of last ditch, this last effort that gets made that is by definition chaotic and unstructured. Although I do find it interesting that in this case with the EP3, only one of the people on the plane had actually done a drill around destroying this equipment. I guess you presume the most likely scenario for that, you know, what happens to this equipment and a disaster is the plane is destroyed. The plane's

at the bottom of the ocean or the plane blows up. You don't think about the plane having to make an emergency landing in a hostile country. Yeah. You're either going to get sharp. down or you're going to find somewhere else to land or you'll be able to ditch in the sea or something like that. But it is amazing. They hadn't been well trained, but they did what they could. I mean, they do stuff like pouring freshly brewed coffee onto the disc drives of the computers and the motherboards. The coffee's percolating as the plane's coming apart. Carry up. The drips too slow. And then they get an axe. And the axe is not, it's from the survival kit for the plane. And they're going to try and use that to smash up the hard drives of the

computer. But they don't really know exactly which bits they have to smash up and the blade of the axe is not that sharp. So they end up not necessarily smashing the right bits of the computer. And they're also just jumping on the computers. They're kind of bashing them against things. You know, they bash one box, which has got crypto equipment, secret code stuff in it. And it springs open and classified papers go everywhere. And it's just kind of flying around this plane. You imagine the plane is kind of falling apart. There's, you know, classified papers flying around. There's no shredder on board.

So then that seems like an oversight. Yeah, it does. You should have a shredder. I mean, I've got a shredder at home. If I was flying a classified spy plane. All of your sensitive materials that are destroyed. But they have got shredder. So they're just tearing it up into pieces.

And then, you know, they've got cassette tape. Younger listeners may not know what cassette tape is. But, you know, even David may not know. But, you know, they're kind of pulling it out. I know what a cassette tape is, Gordon. Sorry. I love this description. Someone describes the plane's interior as resembling the aftermath of a frat party, which

is like, as you can imagine, it's just stuff everywhere. The ping pong tables covered in beer. Guys with axes. Guys with axes. We've all been there. But, I mean, they don't have much time to do this, right? This is happening in, what, 20 minutes or so before they're going to land at the airbase. And it's fascinating as well.

because we'd mentioned there were two planes that intercepted them. So there was Wang and then it was his wingman. His wingman actually asked for permission from the Chinese base to shoot down the EP3. And the Chinese kind of fortunately say no. So the wingman heads off back to back to the base and lands at this base 10 minutes ahead of the EP3, which is now heading in. Shane Osborne is fighting the airplane. It's really tough.

And it's continuing to disintegrate as he's heading towards Hainan and Ling Shui base. The far left engine isn't working, but the blades are still spinning around. And he's worried that they'll lose lubrication and then kind of fly off the propellers and hit the airplane and really destroy it. He doesn't want to fly over the town of Ling Shui because he's worried about crashing into it and killing civilians. So he has to maneuver. He could only turn left because of the aileron's gone. So, I mean, like, it's the weirdest way of flying. But he lines up for the runway.

This is also going to become important. He's been trying to contact the air base to say he's coming into land, issuing Maydays, but he's not getting any response. He also can't dump his fuel. So he's about 25,000 pounds overweight for landing. The flaps are too damaged to slow down. He's relying on a navigator in the back calling out the ground. speed and he's coming in fast to land at about 190 knots and then he hits the runway doesn't know whether the nose gear will come down but fortunately it does and actually at that moment he says

that is the first time as he hit the runway that he thinks maybe i'm going to live maybe we're going to make it and he manages to stop the plane just before the end of the runway which is also how it would appear in the film i think this is that's what you would that's how you'd write it. And at this point, they are greeted not by ambulances, but by two-armed troop carriers with dozens of Chinese soldiers who are wielding AK-47s. And they're now guests of the Chinese government courted, guests slash hostages, because this is now, I think it's fair to say, turned into a major, not just hostage crisis, but an international diplomatic crisis. That's right. So let's leave it there. And next time we'll come back and we'll look at what it

takes to resolve this crisis and what it tells us about some of the incidents which have been happening recently, not least over Europe, involving spy planes, in this case, NATO spy planes, including British ones, being intercepted by Russian jets and some of the risks involved. with this. So that'll be next time, but a reminder, of course, do sign up for our newsletter if you haven't already, because that's going to have this new off-air segment in the newsletter where we'll go into a bit more detail about some of the history around this story. And also, we're going to have a club interview for our club members with Nigel Inkster, who is a very interesting man, who is a former deputy head of MI6, but is also one of MI6's leading China specialists. And so we're

be talking to him about, really about this incident, but also what it tells us about the West and China and how the intelligence agencies have seen China evolve over the years. So that is going to be a really interesting interview for our club members. So do join the Declassified Club. Also a reminder, Gordon, that we have a couple live shows coming up in September. So you can get your tickets for those. We've got one that we'll be doing. And then we've got one in which Gordon will attempt to moderate a conversation between me and the mooch, which I think is going to be quite challenging. So not to be missed, you can get all of those tickets and details at the rest is classified.com. We'll see you next time.

See you next time.