Luca Morandini wrote:

Ogden Johnson III wrote:

Luca Morandini wrote:

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.

Hmmm... I beg to differ, it would have been MUCH easier for the US Navy
to recover/destroy sensitive material than for the Chinese one to do so.

Wouldn't that depend on exactly where the ditched/autopiloted EP-3E
ended up? [Wondering at Luca's assumption in the previous post that
the EP-3E's autopilot would have been any better in handling a
severely damaged aircraft than the pilot himself did.] It could very
well have ended up deep inside PRC territorial waters, or even on land
within the PRC. Kinda hard for the USN to beat the PLA to the wreck
in that case. ;-

Anyway, may I conclude that regulations prescribe sensitive material to
be destroyed but NOT at the cost of destroying the entire aircraft or
putting the crew in danger ?

Feel free. I wouldn't, but you certainly can. Regulations will
prescribe different things *for* different things. I trust the US
learned its lesson from the Pueblo, and that the EP-3E did not carry
anything onboard that required destruction of the aircraft, even at
the cost of the death of the entire crew, to prevent it from falling
into "hostile" hands. There may be secrets that require such extreme
protection, but one doesn't put them on an unarmed or under-armed ship
or aircraft that you send to snoop around exactly the place you want
to protect the secret from.

OJ III