At about 09:15 local time on 1 April 2001, a US Navy EP-3E ARIES II of Fleet Air Reconnaissance Squadron One (VQ-1), BuNo 156511, was flying a signals-intelligence mission from Kadena on Okinawa over the South China Sea, about 70 miles from Hainan. Two naval J-8II interceptors from Lingshui came up to meet it. One of them, number 81194, was flown by Lieutenant Commander Wang Wei.

What happened next is the heart of the dispute. The US account is that the EP-3 was on autopilot in straight and level flight when the J-8 bumped the wing of the larger, slower aircraft. The Chinese account, from Wang Wei’s wingman, is that the American aircraft veered at a wide angle towards the J-8 and struck it. China took both aircraft’s flight recorders and has never released their data, so neither version can be checked. The J-8 went into the sea and Wang Wei was killed.

The EP-3 was badly damaged. Its pilot, Lieutenant Shane Osborn, made at least 15 distress calls that went unanswered and then landed at Lingshui without permission — putting a US intelligence aircraft, and whatever its crew could not destroy, on a Chinese military airfield. The 24 crew, 21 men and three women, were held until 11 April 2001.

Their release followed a letter from the US ambassador, Joseph Prueher, saying the United States was "very sorry" for Wang Wei’s death and for the aircraft entering Chinese airspace without clearance. Washington called it an expression of regret, not an apology; in China it became known as the letter of the two sorries. The aircraft itself stayed at Lingshui until July, when it was released in pieces and flown out from 3 July 2001 by two Antonov An-124s of the Russian airline Polet. China honoured Wang Wei as a "Guardian of Territorial Airspace and Waters"; President George W. Bush wrote to his widow.

In 2001 Lingshui was an interceptor base, its J-8IIs placed to meet reconnaissance flights off Hainan; English Wikipedia also records a signals-intelligence facility there that tracks civil and military activity and monitors satellite communications. Since then the base has shifted towards the navy’s eyes and ears. Wikipedia, citing Defense News and Jane’s, reports KJ-500 early-warning aircraft and Y-8Q anti-submarine aircraft, the latter with a tail-mounted magnetic anomaly detector for finding submarines, as well as J-15 carrier fighters; Soar Dragon high-altitude drones were reported earlier, though their recent presence is unconfirmed.

That mix matches what the navy kept after 2023, when, according to the China Aerospace Studies Institute, at least three fighter brigades, two bomber regiments and numerous airfields passed to the air force. Satellite imagery has shown the parking areas being rebuilt since 2004 and reconnaissance aircraft present between 2017 and 2020; reports in 2021 described a growing naval footprint at Hainan’s southern tip. China itself publishes nothing about the base’s units, and this page does not guess at them.

Hainan has been a naval aviation front for six decades. During the Vietnam War, US aircraft heading for the Gulf of Tonkin passed close to the island, and Chinese Wikipedia credits naval fighters with several of them: an F-4C south of Yulin on 26 June 1967, claimed by two J-6 pilots, and an A-1H on 14 February 1968, claimed by J-5s. These are Chinese claims; US records of the same events were not checked for this page, and the sources do not say which Hainan airfield the fighters flew from. Chinese Wikipedia’s pre-reform order of battle placed one South Sea Fleet aviation division at Lingshui and another at Jialai.

The island matters even more now. The carrier Shandong was commissioned at Sanya on 17 December 2019 and Fujian on 5 November 2025, and both have used Yulin Naval Base there. A naval air station a short distance up the coast gives the fleet land-based early warning, anti-submarine patrols and a place for carrier fighters ashore, which is why the reported mix at Lingshui reads like a support base for the carriers rather than the interceptor station of 2001. That reading is an inference from published types, not something China has said.