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Old 22nd Mar 2020, 10:11
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Martin the Martian
 
Join Date: Nov 2007
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Interesting piece in The Sunday Times Irish news section today:

Russian planes flying in rings off Kerry linked to submarines

Giant military planes spend two hours doing circles off the Irish coast to ‘test Nato preparedness’

The Tu-142MR Bear-J was one of six aircraft monitored by Nato and European air forces as it skirted the west coast before flying in circles off Kerry for two hours on March 7.

Military aviation experts say the aircraft is designed to communicate with submarines using a 5km-long trailing antenna, which it reels out in mid-air.

The aircraft was among six long-range Russian aircraft whose activities were monitored off the west coast on three separate occasions. The movements of the aircraft were tracked by Nato as they came around the north of Europe before passing Scotland and Ireland.

The first incident occurred on March 7 when a Tu-142MK Bear-F anti-submarine aircraft and the Bear-J communications relay aircraft were monitored over the Atlantic.

Two more Tu-142 Bear-F anti-submarine aircraft were monitored on March 11 while a pair of Tu-160 Blackjack bombers were seen on March 12. The bombers have missiles that can strike targets on land from far out at sea.

Keir Giles, an associate fellow at Chatham House, the British think-tank, said the flights posed a serious danger to transatlantic flights. He said the Bear-J relay was normally used to communicate with submarines using its “immensely long trailing antenna” for very low frequency (VLF) radio transmissions.

“This was the aircraft that circled off Kerry on March 7. The other Bear type, the Bear-F, is equipped to search for and destroy submarines and can also carry out long-range reconnaissance,” he said.

Giles said Russian military aircraft often passed off the west coast without talking to air traffic control or filing a flight plan. In many cases, their transponders are switched off, which prevents civilian air traffic control centres from tracking their movements.

“This has a significant impact on civilian air traffic, which [may] have to be rerouted in order to ensure it can continue safely — especially if there is a danger that a Bear-J might be trailing an enormously long antenna,” said Giles, who has been an adviser to the British on Russian intentions.

“It’s tempting to assume that a submarine will be where a Bear-J is circling, or even that this will be connected with known Russian interest in transatlantic subsea cables in and around Ireland. But VLF transmissions have enormously long range, so the submarine or submarines the aircraft were talking to, if there were any there at all, could have been in an entirely different part of the world,” he added.

Mark Galeottik, an expert on the Russian military, said it was almost certain that Russia was testing Nato response times and that the flights were Moscow’s way of projecting resolve.

“Switching off their transponders, which the Russians shouldn’t do but is routine, is at once a provocation,’’ said Galeotti. “That said, in this case it absolutely does appear that they were testing Nato preparedness.”

The Department of Foreign Affairs declined to say whether it had made representations to Moscow. “The government keeps all matters of national security under constant review,” it said.

The Russian embassy in Dublin confirmed its military carried out training missions in the north Atlantic.

“These flights take place in the international airspace. The aircraft at no point enter the sovereign airspace of Ireland, or any other country. Our military aircraft has been flying these missions for many decades. It has never been a problem for anyone, except, maybe, for the Nato establishment who has been exploiting for their own purposes the myth of Russian threat throughout much of a modern history,” it said.



Flying around in airspace without a transponder is not a problem. Of course not.
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