To get shot down you are assuming that the PLA Airforce has armed jets cruising around or SAMs with missiles prepped for launch AND the Command & Control willing to make a unilateral decision in a few minutes.
How do you know there aren't?
It's military airspace after all. How do you know they aren't conducting war games? Or surveilling some Yanks just south of Hainan, as you slip off the airway into the thick of it?
The guys who blasted that CX flight out of the sky were reputedly executed afterward. So they may have acted off their own bat. Forget command and control so!
Or maybe they actually did as they were told, and later made scapegoats. Same net result for CX and its passengers.
The guy who rammed the Yank spy plane probably wasn't told to do that, right? But he didn't need live rounds to get the result he desired. And China still holds the spy plane. Might be considered a 'win' by them.
So you see how things can easily escalate. Fighter pilots are trained killers after all. And mistakes happen.
How long have you lived here?
You mean planet earth? Or just Hong Kong?
Maybe some of you guys haven't been keeping up with current events, but there's a huge military standoff, and political confrontation going on right on your doorstep! Some commentators are openly forecasting a clash which could lead to a Third World War. Top level talks have been held between China and the US in an attempt to cool the rhetoric. But nobody is backing down, least of all China, and with loose cannons like the Philipines and Taiwan involved anything could happen.
Yes it's all so hard to contemplate, isn't it. Especially if you have a short attention span and a general air of denial regarding the seriousness of the situation.
US-China war 'inevitable' unless Washington drops demands over South China Sea
“If the United States’ bottom line is that China has to halt its activities, then a US-China war is inevitable in the South China Sea”, said the paper, which is often seen as a mouth-piece of hardline nationalists in the government in Beijing."
"The People’s Liberation Army, including its navy and air force, will be allowed to “project power” further beyond its borders at sea and more assertively in the air in order to safeguard its maritime possessions, the [Chinese] white paper stated."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...China-Sea.html