How We Helped Get Our U.S. Navy Plane Home From China
    Plus, A Beijing Dairy Queen 'Aided''
by Caffilene Allen, APHIS Public Affairs Staff

     It was a story which transfixed the country this past spring. On April 1 a Chinese fighter jet and a U.S. Navy surveillance plane collided off the Chinese coast. The U.S. plane then made an emergency landing on China's Hainan Island, and its crew of 24 military personnel was detained there in southern China for 11 days. Artful diplomacy led to the release of the crewmembers--but the U.S. EP-3E aircraft, still sitting on the runway, was detained further. Finally, China permitted the release of the plane--but wouldn't allow it to be flown out intact, and instead required that it be disassembled and shipped out in pieces. Once disassembled, the last of the plane parts finally arrived at Dobbins AFB in Marietta, Ga., on July 5.

     USDA had a crucial--but unheralded and behind-the-scenes--role to play in ensuring that the U.S. plane returned to the U.S. Here's how it happened.

     Since the U.S. Navy plane had to be disassembled before being allowed to leave Hainan Island, 10,000 pounds of solid wood packing material were to be used in literally boxing up, in crates, the various plane parts. Those crates would then be loaded onto U.S. cargo aircraft--which were allowed to fly into China for this purpose--and flown back to the U.S.

     But first the wood--yellow poplar wood and plywood which came from South Carolina--had to be certified. According to Cathy Solis, a plant protection and quarantine officer based in an Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service field office in Greer, S.C., Chinese regulations require that designated types of solid wood packing material must be certified by APHIS before it can be imported into China from the U.S. "It's a measure designed to prevent the introduction of wood-boring insects into China," she explained. So Solis certified the lumber on June 5 at a service facility in Greenville, S.C., run by Lockheed Martin--the manufacturer of the U.S. Navy plane.

     "If we hadn't done that inspection, China wouldn't have allowed the lumber through its borders," she advised.

     Then the 10,000 pounds of wood had to be made into crates. "Lockheed's original game plan was to have the crates constructed in the U.S.," Solis said. "But then the word came down that the cargo plane had to leave at 5 p.m. on the day I had certified the lumber--June 5. So Lockheed had no time to get those crates made in stateside facilities--and the cargo plane had to take off with a load of lumber, not a load of wooden crates."

     Accordingly, the cargo plane carrying the bundles of lumber left the U.S. and landed in Japan for a three-day stop at the U.S. Air Force Base in Kadena, Okinawa, Japan. There the wood was assembled into crates.

Dale Maki is stationed in Beijing, China as the international services area director for APHIS. He was asked by the U.S. military and Lockheed Martin to facilitate the movement of the 10,000 pounds of wood.

     "The U.S. had been advised by China's Foreign Ministry," he recounted, "that a major concern--and one which threatened the entire operation--was the transportation route for that wood."

     According to Jim Mackley, APHIS international services area director for Japan, based in Tokyo, the first complication concerned the wood's three-day stopover in Japan. "That three-day stop," he advised, "would ordinarily have meant that the entire shipment would have had to be treated and recertified in Japan--by Japanese quarantine officials--and would have arrived in China with Japan listed as the country of origin."

     "That," Mackley noted, "would have required entirely different documentation--and would have increased the chances of the 10,000 pounds of wood being rejected by Chinese authorities."

     "So I had to persuade the authorities in China to accept the 10,000 pounds of wood for packing material with the appropriate certificates from the United States--even though the wood was assembled in Japan," said Maki. He noted that, ordinarily, the stop in Japan would have resulted in the wood losing its U.S. identity. "But the Chinese officials agreed to accept the shipment as in-transit from Japan--which meant the U.S. papers were still valid with the shipment."

     The second complication came when Mackley's office was alerted by the U.S. military that some additional wood might be added to the shipment in Japan. "But Dale Maki met with Lockheed and U.S. military officials at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and explained that adding wood in Japan would complicate an already difficult situation," Mackley said.

     "Lockheed and the U.S. military then agreed, on-the-spot, to not add wood packing materials in Japan," Maki added.

     The third complication came when the Chinese agricultural officers discovered some coniferous wood in the shipment--that had been certified only for nonconiferous wood. "However, they still agreed to accept the shipment," Maki said.

     The fourth complication came, ironically, on a Saturday when Maki and his family were at a local market in Beijing. "I got a call on my cell phone," he recalled. "I was asked to fax certain phytosanitary documents to Hainan, where a U.S. delegation was due to arrive in a couple of hours and begin negotiations on procedures, once the plane carrying the packing material arrived."

     However, the one fax machine that personnel could find in Hainan was in the process of receiving a 100-page document. "So my family patiently waited for me--at a Beijing Dairy Queen a few blocks away--until I could get the documents faxed to Hainan," he said.

     "Good relationships with my family," Maki quipped, "helped this mission succeed."

     The fifth complication came once the U.S.-Chinese negotiations were complete. APHIS's own employees still faced issues arising from the agency's own regulations. Maki had earlier raised such questions as "When this shipment comes into the United States, how are we going to receive it?" and "Will APHIS make an exception and allow this cargo to be received back into the United States as U.S. wood packing materials?"

     But APHIS's plant protection and quarantine officers did make an exception. So the final parts of the disassembled U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane, packed in crates built from the 10,000 pounds of wood, arrived at Dobbins Air Force Base on July 5.

     Maki emphasized that the ultimate success of APHIS's part of this mission was in large part due to the personal and friendly relationships that had already been established between Chinese and USDA employees. "My prior positive relations with personnel in China's state general administration for quality supervision, inspection, and quarantine--the Chinese equivalent of our plant protection and quarantine--served us well," Maki said. "So we could communicate freely."

     "This situation," Maki underscored, "really illustrates the benefit of building good relationships with our counterparts in foreign countries."