Pentagon: Chinese jet got too close to spy plane

BEIJING — The U.S. military has accused a Chinese fighter jet of maneuvering too fast and too close to a U.S. Air Force RC-135 reconnaissance plane as it flew in international airspace over the East China Sea this week.

The U.S. Pacific Command said in a statement that one of two Chinese jets involved in an intercept operation Tuesday had “an unsafe excessive rate of closure on the RC135 aircraft.”

“This seems to be a case of improper airmanship, as no other provocative or unsafe maneuvers occurred,” the Pacific Command said.

The episode was the second report of an unsafe intercept recently by a Chinese jet tracking a U.S. spy plane in the waters around China.

Last month, the Pentagon said two Chinese fighter jets flew dangerously close to an EP-3 aircraft off the coast of Hainan, the southernmost province of China.

In that case, the Chinese plane flew within 50 feet of the U.S. plane over the South China Sea, breaking an agreement on safe conduct in the air that Beijing and Washington signed last year, the Pentagon said.

The East China Sea is a sensitive area for China and Japan, a U.S. treaty ally. Islands known as the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in China, a group of uninhabited rocks in the East China Sea, are the center of a territorial dispute between the countries, which regularly dispatch patrol ships close to them.