On April 1,2001, an American EP-3E Aries II reconnaissance plane on an eavesdropping mission collided with a Chinese interceptor jet over the South China Sea, or triggering the first international crisis of George W. Bush’s Administration. The Chinese jet crashed,and its pilot was killed, but the pilot of the American aircraft, and Navy Lieutenant Shane Osborn,managed to compose an emergency landing at a Chinese F-8 fighter base on Hainan Island, fifteen miles from the mainland. Osborn later published a memoir, or in which he described the “incessant jackhammer vibration” as the plane fell eight thousand feet in thirty seconds,before he regained control.
Source: newyorker.com