HAIKOU, China – An airliner carrying 24 crew members of a U.S. spy plane held for 12 days in China took off Thursday, ending an intense standoff between Washington and Beijing.
The chartered Continental Boeing 737 took off at about 7:30 a.m. local time from the civilian airport at Haikou, the capital of Hainan island. It quickly disappeared into the cloudy sky.
U.S. officials said the plane will take the crew to the U.S. territory of Guam, where it will refuel before going on to Hawaii.
The airliner had taken off from Guam for China hours earlier to retrieve the 21 men and three women, who landed their damaged U.S. Navy EP-3E on Hainan after colliding with a Chinese fighter jet on April 1 over the South China Sea.
After announcing it would release the crew, the Chinese government said it would keep their surveillance plane until it could hold more talks with the United States starting April 18.
The release of the spy plane crew came after President Bush agreed to say the United States was “very sorry” for a Chinese pilot’s death and the U.S. plane’s landing without permission.
Wednesday’s delicate, carefully worded compromise – characterized immediately by Chinese officials as an apology – capped days of tortuous linguistic negotiation over the release of the air crew and the in-flight collision that has threatened U.S.-China relations.
It offered a tolerable way out for the governments of two powerful, deeply intertwined nations that, in public, had maintained intractable positions. The United States evaded the full apology demanded by China, which nevertheless extracted an intricate series of expressions of sorrow from Washington.
Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan said China had agreed to release the crew on “humanitarian grounds.”
