A U.S. military aircraft flew hourslong reconnaissance sorties along China's coastline on at least three days this week, according to flight records, coinciding on one occasion with the Chinese navy's testing of its advanced new aircraft carrier.
Aircraft GPS signals received by the flight-tracking network Flightradar24 showed an RC-135U Combat Sent spy plane taking off from Kadena Air Base, on Japan's Okinawa island, and embarking on long-endurance flights on May 7, 9 and 10.
Okinawa is home to around two-thirds of the 50,000 or so American troops stationed in Japan, while Kadena—near the center of the so-called first island chain—is a major air hub for U.S. and allied aircraft in the Western Pacific.
Newsweek's map roughly tracks the Combat Sent's eight-hour flight on Tuesday, when it transited the Luzon Strait north of the Philippines and reached the Gulf of Tonkin near Vietnam. The plane appeared to circle the China-controlled Paracel Islands, a disputed archipelago in the South China Sea, before loitering around the Pearl River Delta in southern China.
On six-hour flights on each of Thursday and Friday, the Combat Sent left Kadena and flew north through the East China Sea to reach Yellow Sea off northeastern China. On both days, it scanned areas off Shanghai, where China's maritime safety authority had announced a no-go zone for the aircraft carrier Fujian's first sea trials from May 1 to 9.
It was not immediately clear whether the Combat Sent's maneuvers were related to the Chinese navy tests—the U.S. Defense Department does not comment on specific operations.
China's Defense Ministry did not return a written request for comment and did not answer calls after hours.
The RC-135 family of reconnaissance platforms, built by China-sanctioned Boeing Defense, have been in use since the Cold War.
The U.S. Air Force's Combat Sent intelligence-collection aircraft—identified by the antennas on the underside of its front fuselage, the tail cone and wing tips—is designed to intercept and analyze signals from foreign military radars in peacetime to aid in the development of wartime countermeasures.
The Combat Sent is among several crewed and uncrewed U.S. aircraft that conduct regular reconnaissance in the East and South China seas. They often patrol near China's shores but always outside its territorial airspace, according to incomplete monthly and annual reports released by the South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative, a Peking University think tank.
In March, statistics published by SCSPI suggested U.S. spy flights in the South China Sea reached at least 1,000 sorties in each of the last four years.
While the United States says its forces will fly and sail wherever international law allows, China continues to complain publicly that American aircraft and vessels are operating too close to Chinese territory.
This week, after Canberra said a Chinese fighter jet had endangered the lives of an Australian helicopter crew in international waters in the Yellow Sea, Beijing accused the U.S. ally of deliberately approaching a Chinese navy exercise in the same area.
U.S. officials criticized the Chinese military for what it considered another "unsafe and unprofessional" air intercept. Several similar cases involving the Chinese air force were disclosed last fall in a release by the U.S. Defense Department.
A Pentagon spokesperson told Newsweek no additional risky intercepts had been reported since U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping met in San Francisco in November.
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John Feng is Newsweek's contributing editor for Asia based in Taichung, Taiwan. His focus is on East Asian politics. He ... Read more
