U.S. Navy accuses Chinese navy ship of using lasers against its P-8 aircraft
The U.S. Navy has accused China’s navy of using a laser on one of its P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft while it was flying in airspace above international waters approximately 380 miles west of Guam on Feb. 17
Calling the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s destroyer’s actions as “unsafe and unprofessional”, it added that “these acts violate the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea (CUES), a multilateral agreement reached at the 2014 Western Pacific Naval Symposium to reduce the chance of an incident at sea”, noting that “CUES specifically addresses the use of lasers that could cause harm to personnel or damage to equipment”.
The U.S. Navy also noted the destroyer’s actions as “inconsistent with a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between U.S. Department of Defense and the Ministry of National Defense of the PRC regarding rules of behavior for safety of air and maritime encounters.”
The laser from what was identified by the U.S. Navy as coming from the PLAN destroyer “161”, was not visible to the naked eye, was captured by a sensor onboard the P-8A, which was assigned to Patrol Squadron 45, based out of Jacksonville, Florida, and is forward-deployed to Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa, Japan.
PLAN destroyer 161 is the Type 052D (Luyang-III) class guided missile destroyer Hohhot. This is one of the newer Type 052Ds, commissioned into China’s Navy only in 2018. The ship was one of a four-ship task group from China’s South Sea Fleet that undertook a rare voyage into the Western Pacific across the International Date Line in February.
During the 41-day voyage, the ships also undertook a series of exercises that included gun and missile live firing, clocking up a reported 14,000 nautical miles (25,930 km) before returning to China on 25th of February.
