Could China Find Japan's Lost F-35 and Steal Its Secrets? The U.S. Says No.
Here's a worry question about Japan's missing-and-presumed-lost F-35 fighter jet: What if China finds it first? The U.S. government isn't worried, or so it says.
Washington believes the joint Japanese-American recovery effort will locate the remains of the aircraft before other countries, particularly China and Russia. The U.S. has chartered a deep sea diving support vessel, the Van Gogh, to assist in locating the aircraft.
The Japan Air Self Defense Force F-35A was part of a four-aircraft group that took off from Misawa air base in northern Japan on a routine training mission earlier this month. The aircraft’s last known location was approximately 85 miles east of Misawa city in Japan’s Aomori prefecture.
After the F-35 went missing, U.S. and Japanese ships and planes joined forces to search for the missing pilot, with the U.S. Navy contributing P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft and a guided missile destroyer to the search. The Japanese pilot was never found, though, and the search has since shifted from the rescue to recovery phase.
A Japanese search and rescue plane reportedly found F-35 debris on the surface of the ocean and detected an oil slick, so the two countries have a rough idea where the plane went down. Depending on ocean conditions, however, the debris could have drifted a considerable distance from the actual location where the plane hit the water.
According to the Air Force Times, acting U.S. Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan told the press last week, “The Japanese have the lead (in the recovery operation), and we’re working very collaboratively with them. And we’ve got a capability if what they have doesn’t prove to be sufficient.”
In the meantime, Japan’s Mainichi Shimbun newspaper reports the research vessel Kaimei, operated by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, will join the search for the missing fighter. Kaimei is designed to conduct surveys of deep sea seabeds with an eye toward earthquake and tsunami research as well as mineral and methane hydrate exploration. For that reason, the ship is equipped with a remote operating vehicle (ROV) that can dive to depths up to 3,000 meters, or 9,842 feet, which could be useful in hunting for the lost aircraft.
The Mainichi also reports the U.S. government has chartered the DP2 DSCV Van Gogh, a commercial deep sea diving support vessel. In addition to diving support, the Van Gogh also carries 150-ton cranes capable of recovering objects up to 3,000 meters down.
Could China or Russia locate the fighter and spirit it away to harvest the technology before the Japanese and Americans do? It’s possible, but unlikely. In the early 1970s the CIA built a ship, the Glomar Explorer, to recover the remains of a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine that had been lost in the Pacific Ocean. Both Beijing and Moscow have assets capable of looking for the ship but conducting a search less than a hundred miles from the Japanese mainland would be conspicuous and awkward.
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