The "Hunt for Red October" Meets "Titanic"

🛩️🌊 A race against time is underway in the South China Sea, where the US Navy is scrambling to reclaim a downed fighter jet lying at the bottom of the ocean before Chinese salvagers arrive.

• The $100 million plane is a Navy prototype of the F-35 stealth fighter jet specially modified to operate off an aircraft carrier.
• In a statement, the Navy said the pilot "safely ejected from the aircraft" after a “landing mishap” during routine flight operations on Monday, which resulted in seven injured sailors. The cause of the crash is currently under investigation.
• Since the plane sank in international waters, it’s finders keepers, meaning whichever country gets to the plane – and its highly-classified equipment – first wins.
• The Navy has refused to confirm the exact location of the aircraft’s disappearance or the length of its ongoing retrieval process, but experts say it’ll likely take at least ten days.

+From the annals: China has a history of recovering other countries’ military tech – in 1972, the Chinese military secretly salvaged a UK submarine off its eastern coast, and it's widely believed that Beijing ended up with the wreckage of an American stealth helicopter that crash-landed in the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound.