China has disclosed an incident last year in which one of its J-16 aircraft locked onto and expelled two unnamed foreign stealth fighter jets of a type that has not appeared near the country’s coastal waters since.
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State broadcaster CCTV on Friday aired an interview with Li Chao, a pilot from the People’s Liberation Army’s Western Theatre Command, who recounted the event that happened during a coastal training exercise last year.
Without naming any country, Li said the foreign forces had “clear intentions … of intersecting and provoking us” and that they were “directly heading for our two aircraft”.
“Our territorial waters are behind us, and they were approaching us, so we had to go over,” recalled Li, who was operating China’s domestically produced J-16 fighter jet.
After a series of manoeuvres during the encounter, Li said he managed to perform a barrel roll and fly inverted over one of the foreign jets. At one point, his canopy was just 10 to 15 metres (33 to 49 feet) away from the jet.
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“After completing this manoeuvre, I locked onto both aircraft simultaneously and both [foreign jets] eventually left,” he said.