Not Even Close
If you did the job it is obvious what happened in the Baltic Sea the day after the Malaysian airliner was downed in the Ukraine. The information is in the CNN story, U.S. official: Spy plane flees Russian jet, radar; ends up over Sweden, but the people reporting it do not have a clue what actually happened.
First off, this was a reconnaissance aircraft, not a ‘spy plane’. What’s the difference you ask? If you look up the aircraft [RC-135 River Joint] you will note that is prominently marked as a US Air Force aircraft and even has a US flag on the vertical stabilizer as well as the large letters OF which identify it as belonging to the 55th Wing at Offutt AFB, Nebraska. I can assure you that the CIA does not use vehicles marked “Central Intelligence Agency, Langley, Virginia” with US government license plates. These aircraft are more noticeably marked to prevent other governments from claiming that they didn’t know they were US aircraft.
Every nation that has radar scans their airspace, for air traffic control if nothing else, so this aircraft was certainly being scanned by Sweden, Finland, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. Being scanned by ground-based radars is not a cause for concern.
The only radars that “lock on” are associated with weapons systems, not air traffic control, and a “lock on” is a cause for concern for anyone who can detect it. Detection systems may soon become an option for airliners if things continue as they have recently.
Going into Swedish airspace was a good tactical move, as it removes the legal haggling over ‘international waters’ and brings Swedish air defense radars on-line to monitor the situation and record the data.
The Russians just bought a load of trouble for their Tu-95s that do reconnaissance in the Arctic. More testosterone poisoning…
2 comments
I presume it was doing electronic eavesdropping as well as simple recon. I.e., spying on communications. Close enough to “spy plane” for media purposes, though of course it’s not what the military considers to be a spy plane.
And yeah, if it juked into Swedish air space I presume somebody did a weapons lock on it, at which point if you’re in an unarmed recon plane, well, you’re not going to hang around. I read it pretty much the same way you did, i.e., that they juked into Swedish air space because it seemed that the situation was about to escalate way past the edge of sanity.
When they are shooting down airliners and playing bump and run in the Sea of Okhotsk you can’t trust them to be rational. Things were much more civilized during the Cold War. The North Koreans were always crazy, but even the Chinese were more careful about ‘incidents’ when I was flying the Rivet Brass version of the RC-135. The Baltic was an RC-130 mission in those days.
“Spy” is not something that members of the uniformed services like to hear associated with their activities. It brings up visions of firing squads.