Saturday, December 9, 2000

By Sandra Jontz and Steve Liewer
Stars and Stripes

WASHINGTON — The Navy aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk changed its response-time procedures dealing with aircraft flyovers following an incident in which two Russian fighter planes flew just hundreds of feet directly over the ship’s deck, a Pentagon spokesman said Thursday.

Ken Bacon declined to specify what changes the Kitty Hawk crew has made, but said they center on an "enhanced" response time in which the carrier’s fighter planes will respond to flyovers.

The Washington Times reported Friday that the crew took 40 minutes to get an airplane off the carrier — a procedure the paper’s sources said should take about 15 minutes. A Navy spokesman said the jet scrambled within half an hour.

The changes were initiated by and involve only the Kitty Hawk, and have not been implemented throughout the Navy, Bacon said.

He said Russian warplanes flew over the Kitty Hawk three times in the Sea of Japan — on Oct. 12, Oct. 17 and Nov. 9. He added they were not a surprise to the Kitty Hawk crew, which had spotted the Russian jets when they were 30 to 45 minutes away from the battle group.

Cmdr. Matt Brown, a spokesman for the 7th Fleet Command in Yokosuka, Japan — the Kitty Hawk’s home port — said during the Cold War these types of incidents might have raised an alarm. Today, they don’t.

"We see Russian aircraft and Russian ships that we see all the time," Brown said. "We’re not in the Cold War anymore. No one looked at this as being much of an incident."

Capt. Kevin Wensing, a spokesman for the Commander in Chief Pacific Fleet, said during the Oct. 12 and Nov. 9 incidents the Russian aircraft came only within several miles of the ship as it cruised in the northern Sea of Japan, between the island of Hokkaido and the Russian mainland.

During the Oct. 17 incident, Wensing said, the Kitty Hawk was in the midst of an underway replenishment in the same area. The Washington Times, quoting unnamed Navy sources, said the two Russian aircraft — an SU-24 Fencer and an SU-27 Flanker — buzzed the Kitty Hawk’s tower at an altitude of about 200 feet.

Wensing disputed the report. He said no one on the ship is certain of the altitude, but it was at least "several hundred feet," and perhaps as much as 1,000 feet.

"It was certainly not 200 feet, and certainly not buzzing the tower," he said.

At the time, Wensing said, the Kitty Hawk was on "Alert-30" status, a relatively low level of alert he said would not be unusual during peacetime in a part of the world now considered placid. That means that an aircraft could be scrambled within 30 minutes to intercept an intruder.

"The ship, the battle group, decides what kind of status they should be on," he said. "If you’re in the middle of the Persian Gulf, it would be a lot different than if you were in the middle of the Indian Ocean."

Wensing said the intercept aircraft, F/A-18 Hornets, were delayed slightly because the Kitty Hawk was refueling with another ship. But he said the aircraft still scrambled within the 30-minute guideline.

"We tracked (the Russian jets) from right after they had taken off," Wensing said. "The F/A-18s took off, met up with them and escorted them out of the area."

Following the Oct. 17 flyover, the Russians tweaked the Americans by e-mailing photographs of the carrier’s deck and its warplanes directly to the Kitty Hawk crew’s webmaster through the ship’s Web site, Wensing acknowledged.

Bacon said the Pentagon has not filed any protest with the Russian government and has no plans to do so. Wensing said the Navy could file an INCSEA (incident at sea) report under a Cold War-era treaty with the former Soviet Union, but Pentagon officials did not consider the matter to be a violation.

The practice of flyovers by both the United States and the former Soviet Union was used quite frequently during the Cold War. However, the routine all but stopped when the conflict between the nations ended more than a decade ago.

Since then, the two nations have written agreements to deal with incidents of ship-to-ship contact, however the agreements don’t spell out anything about flyovers, Bacon said.

"They did not violate any agreement," Bacon said of the Russian pilots, said to be on routine training to test the responses of U.S. forward-deployed surveillance.

Last week, Bacon suggested that some faction of the Russian Air Force is still waging the Cold War to explain the decision of military officials in Moscow to hold a press conference and release photographs from the flyovers, taken laterally from several thousand feet away from the Kitty Hawk.

Bacon has said the Russians have been active with recent aircraft deployments and have moved planes into Siberia in eastern Russia and near the Bering Sea across from Alaska.

"The Russians are our friends, basically," Wensing said. "If it were 1960, it would be a different sort of scenario. But it’s 2000."

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