Luca Morandini wrote:

Ogden Johnson III wrote:

"Mike Yared" wrote:

The key part of that report, whether missed by you or the Washington
Times deponent won't even try to guess, was that the crew didn't
manage to destroy all of the classified material and/or equipment
aboard the plane, so some compromise of classified material and/or
equipment to the PRC certainly occurred.

OJ III
[Of course the report didn't identify anything that might have been
compromised; and, as reported in the press, did not blame the crew for
their failure to destroy everything classified, apparently recognizing
that they might have been a tad overtasked by the situation they found
themselves in.]

I know this controversy is old, and, to some extent, irrelevant, but...
was the pilot bound by regulations to ditch the aircraft ?

No. Ditching aircraft, particularly airliner-sized ones, is an
in-extremis, "We're all gonna die anyway", action. However well it
plays in the movies. In this particular situation, no guarantee that
the aircraft - or more correctly, its contents - would be
unrecoverable.

I mean, when he realized all the sensitive material couldn't be
destroyed,

The report, AFAIK, did not go into detail on how much undestroyed
material was involved, or when it became apparent to the aircrew that
some material would not be destroyed.

shouldn't he set the autopilot on and bail out himself (after
allowing for the rest of the crew to bail out safely, of course) ?

Same reason as with the ditching; whatever the aircrew did, there was
no guarantee that the aircraft, wherever it crashed, would be
unrecoverable.

OJ III