WASHINGTON - Aviators sometimes let the ragged edge of human nature get to them when surveillance planes and the jets dogging them come close.
Up there, at 25,000 feet, it can be like road rage down here except it's surveillance planes and jets that are cutting off the other guy, crowding his lane, jarring him so much he spills his coffee, say veterans of these interceptions.
Rules of the Sky
Some agreements to avoid military clashes and accidents at sea or in the air:
1972: Soviet-U.S. agreement, known as INCSEA, sets up rules mainly for naval encounters. It says aircraft commanders shall use "greatest caution and prudence" in approaching ships or planes of the other party at sea.
1988: Dangerous Military Incidents Agreement strengthens guidelines for avoiding confrontations between U.S. and Soviet military.
1992: Open skies treaty is negotiated with the aim of allowing participating nations, including the United States and most of Europe, to send flights over the territory of other participants to observe military activities.
United States ratifies treaty in 1993.
1998: China and the United States agree to consult on naval and air force activities, to promote "common understandings" and mutual trust.
April 18, 2001: Russia's lower house of Parliament votes to ratify the open skies treaty and sends it to the upper house. Treaty can go into effect once approved by Russia and Belarus, which has said it would act after Moscow.
"Too much testosterone and not enough good sense," is how Rep. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., a naval intelligence reservist who flew on surveillance missions over Serbia, sums up the problem.
Washington and Moscow realized long ago something had to be done to keep encounters from getting out of hand. Now the Americans and Chinese are taking up that challenge in the aftermath of the collision between a Navy EP-3E plane and Chinese fighter.
Chinese and U.S. officials are expected to meet within two weeks to explore "rules of the road," as such protocols in the air and at sea are known.
U.S. surveillance airmen who have been buzzed by the competition say it should be fairly simple to work out rules with China for safe flights.
"They should be able to do that sitting around a table in 30 minutes," said retired Navy pilot Ray Leonard of Centreville, Va., who flew intelligence missions drawing Soviet shadowers in the 1980s.
Just agreeing on a set of hand signals between pilots would be better than what exists now."
"Usually, it's a one-finger signal that goes on up there," Kirk said.
U.S. and Chinese forces, however, do not have the years of experience dealing with each other that Washington and Moscow shared in the Cold War, and it took them several years then to strike their initial agreement.
China, which has only recently begun to expand its air and naval reach, has been reluctant to do anything that would legitimize U.S. intelligence-gathering near its territory.
Understandings between American and Soviet fliers operated at various levels, some written, some unspoken. Even so, interceptions could be hairy.
Leonard was frequently buzzed by Soviet jets while flying a plane similar to the EP-3E. Most times, the Americans and Soviets would wave at each other, or salute.
Once, a Soviet pilot "popped up right in front of our nose and shook the airplane pretty badly," he said. His plane's autopilot kicked off in the turbulence.
"Dangerous play," he said, "but play."
His advice: "It's difficult to judge the distance when you're flying, but they should stay 30 to 50 feet away, which is half a wing span of an EP-3. That's still pretty close.
"But more important, they should always approach in a way that they can be seen from the airplane, so they don't come up from behind or underneath."
China says the American propeller plane veered into its jet fighter flown by Wang Wei, who disappeared.
The United States says Wang's jet, having come as close as 3 feet to the EP-3E on a previous pass, hit one of the four propellers on the American plane while it was flying on autopilot.
The collision at about 22,500 feet caused the Navy plane's nose cone to break away and the aircraft plunged 7,500 feet before the pilot, Lt. Shane Osborn, got it under control and made an emergency landing on China's Hainan island.
An initial round of talks on the future of surveillance flights off China and the fate of the crippled plane, still held on the island after the return of the crew, was inconclusive.
"The key issue there is thumping - where the faster jet aircraft will fly across the front of the slower aircraft and generate a huge amount of turbulence so the aircraft will get thumped and everybody's coffee gets spilled," Kirk said.
"That's not supposed to happen. That's the kind of thing that agreements try to prevent."
American and Soviet aviators learned an even broader language of the skies, sometimes by the seat of their pants.
Shaking wings back and forth meant "follow me," Kirk said. When a plane pulled alongside another and fired a weapon harmlessly ahead, that meant, "Obey me or else ... this is your last warning signal."
Of course, safety is not always the point.
Kirk's surveillance flights and others like it during the 1999 Kosovo campaign were often in a combat environment.
"So if the other planes came up next to us," he said, "we would shoot them down."