On April 5, 2015, the monthly military exercise took place near the Naval Aviation University on the shores of Bohai Bay.
Aircraft carriers are not always at sea. Most of the time, Zhou Qichen and his team's training is completed on land, and this time is no exception. He was performing a very ordinary cruise training mission. That morning, he had breakfast as usual and wanted to say hello to Bai Ziyu and several familiar pilots, but he didn't find Bai Ziyu. Another pilot told him that Bai Ziyu went home to visit his family. Zhou Qichen felt a little strange. Bai Ziyu had dinner with him at the same table last night. He didn't say much at the time and didn't take the initiative to mention going home. Zhou Qichen thought that after flying today's mission, he would ask him if something happened at home. He knew that Bai Ziyu's father was not in good health. In fact, in recent times, he felt that Bai Ziyu and himself were a little inexplicably estranged. They were not in the same dormitory, and Zhou Qichen didn't always see him, so he guessed that something happened at home, which led to him not having many gatherings and drinks with his comrades during his rest time recently, and he didn't talk to him much.
After finishing his bowl of porridge and taking a short rest, Zhou Qichen went to the apron for pre-flight inspection. At that time, he did not know what kind of misfortune and horror was waiting for him.
Twenty-seven minutes later, he took off from the Bohai base in a third-generation J-15, but just as he climbed to 500 meters, the fuselage shook violently, and then both engines failed at the same time. He hit a bird over Chenshui County.
Fighter jets have ejection devices, so they can be abandoned and ejected when necessary. This is not a difficult task. But at the time of the accident, he was directly above Chenshui County. In order to avoid residential areas, he operated the fighter jet to turn left and right three times in 30 seconds. During this time, the cabin kept warning that the plane was rapidly losing altitude in the air and would fall in ten seconds.
Finally, he looked up and saw a farmland, and parachuted at a low altitude of 72 meters. The minimum safety requirement for fighter pilots to parachute is 80 meters. Below this altitude, life and death depend on fate. At the moment he was ejected, he actually didn't think he could survive. He thought that his life had some regrets. He had never seen the world outside the blue military uniform, and he had never taken Zhou Qirui to Disney. He had never loved someone properly. But he also tried his best.
The huge thrust at the moment of ejection made him lose consciousness for a short time, and then he woke up in the farmland, and the pain of his whole body almost made him lose consciousness again. Later he learned that he had broken five bones.
His jump also set a record, the lowest altitude for a parachute jump in the entire 29th Army.
The J-15 crashed 50 meters away from him. ZY2968A1B3, a random combination of numbers and letters, this serial number originally had no meaning. But for Zhou Qichen, it was the entire meaning of his 29 years of life up to this day. He had shed blood, sweat, and tears in it.
Because of the plane crash, he was unable to take anything out of the fighter and could only tear off the name tag on the parachute bag.
That was the second major event that changed his life. He later realized that it was at that exact moment, a few hundred meters above Chenshui County, when a few innocent birds circled and flew into the engine of his J-15, that one era ended and another began.