Clearly the Russians are only doing this because the UK's long range bomber/patrol aircraft are doing the same around the North Cape? :}:}:}

I'll get my coat.....

Beagle: If that article is the actual truth, then yes, Rogers should have been court martialled. No doubt about it.

However, I see no citings for official sources. Therefore, it's believability cannot supersede the official report on what happened.

LiveryMan, on November 6, 2003 the International Court of Justice concluded that the U.S. Navy's actions in the Persian Gulf at the time had been unlawful.

"Why is this headline news, during the 70's and 80's it was the norm during the cold war. The big difference now is, the russians are still using the now museum piece the Bear while the western world has moved on slightly to the Typhoon."

no the western world still uses B52 for these purposes which is right from the Bear era

This may be of interest to those who've read BEagle's link - Vincennes: A Case Study | U.S. Naval Institute


I must admit that I thought Rogers retired as a Captain. I have no idea how accurate he was in thinking this, but about 10-12 years ago, a USN officer of my acquaintance speculated that the initial 'it must be the Iranians' fault' approach had been rushed out, it became impossible to CM the Captain and he was instead given a decent final tour before being eased out of the door. (Said USN officer was in the 'WTF was he not court-martialled?' camp).


The boss of the USS Sides was rather unimpressed and displayed a certain amount of testicular fortitude in making his views clear...


https://microeconomics.files.wordpre...roceedings.pdf (the formatting is a bit awkward because of the way the original publication laid out its letters, but if you know this you can pick your way through). Needless to say, David Carlson didn't make Admiral either...

http://www.flankers-site.co.uk/tu-95_files/tu-95_37.jpg

I went on board that at Fairford, it was fairly new then, the inside was pristine but old fashioned. Remember those nixie tube displays? They were all over the inside.

http://tubehobby.com/images/in18/1.jpg

Just after I stepped out of it, I looked up to see this:

http://cdn-www.airliners.net/aviatio.../6/0692619.jpg

I may be flamed for this, but this incident, as well as the MiG collision, the near collision between Russian aircraft and a BA flight over the UK in 1997 and the incident where an Aeroflot crew allowed a child to take the controls which resulted in a crash with 100% fatalities, leads me to suspect that a lot of Russian aircrew tend not to show the same professionalism as those of many other nations.

And with regard to shoot downs, I believe there is a long list of unarmed aircraft, military and civilian, that have fallen to the guns of Soviet fighters while going about their day-to-day business between 1945 and 1991, naughty or otherwise.

I've seen them in some fairly hairy third world environments and I think they are pretty professional but not so risk averse

More like the USAFor RAF around 1970 ................

Question

When the Ruskis fly down the Channel we see lots of (MoD PR) pics of our brave boys alongside - do the French, Belgians and Netherlands also escort them???

I know the Norwegians and the Swedes are pretty active but what about everyone else???

Having worked the English Channel sectors as a Military controller, embedded within the LATCC Ops Room, i can imagine the disruption that caused at FL 295 or whatever.

I think the most polite phrase I could use is "Not a very good idea from a safety aspect", especially if there's no Mode C to give anyone a clue (although I assume the escorting aircraft would be so doing). But it used to require substantial effort to thread Mil traffic through that airspace at any level, coordinating with everyone and anyone. An uncontrollable 'unknown' requires EVERYONE to get out of his way, and that in NOT a bit of airspace where you want to do that.


I recall the Lakenheath Wing, doing French Low Level activity, bugging out due to weather and climbing out of France to go home through the Seaford Sector ... no flight plans, no pre-warning, just a dozen or more aircraft popping up on frequency needing to climb and go home through all the airways. Happy days of the great Civ/Mil relationship at LATCC ;)

Heathrow Harry, yes the French were also up on Wednesday afternoon

Robocruiser is right. A USN carrier was not to far away at the time and well within range to send a section of F-14s or F-18s to check out the contact. The problem was the air wing knew of the cruisers reputation and didn't want to go near it in case it shot at them. Another point is the contact was thought to be an F-14 and the crew of a USN air defence ship should well know that a Tomcat ( at the time ) has next to zero capability to hurt a ship. M61 20mm cannon only and the jet would be well within visual range by the time it was close enough to use it.

Vincennes - I seem to recollect that one of the most embarrassing elements of this whole tragedy was that The Most Technically Advanced war fighting system (i.e. hardware, software, RoE, human and chain-of-command) couldn't differentiate between an benign airliner and something more aggressive. Whichever way you look at it, a rather uncomfortable state of affairs for a super-power to have to admit.

Dr Strangelove played-out in reality.

Support the claim please.

Shields up ?
 

Qué? No KK ? No KKKidding ???

LFH

At 09:28, 200 miles to the south, the USS Forrestal launched 2 x F-14s and 2 x A-7s. The aircraft headed for Point Alpha, a rendezvous point 50 miles outside the Strait of Hormuz. Once there, they would be less than 80 miles from the Vincennes.

At 09:47, the Iranian A300 took off on its routine commercial flight and was observed to have done so by the Vincennes.

Lt Cmdr Lustig, the Vincennes' tactical commander for air warfare, could see that the Forrestal's F-14s were circling 5 min away and could have been vectored onto the suspected target to confirm its identity before it reached the point where Rogers had said that he would launch against it.

However, since 09:41 Will Rogers was inside Iranian waters busily firing 5 inch shells at Iranian boats, shouting and yelling at his gunners to reload faster.

Then at 09:54 Rogers approved the launch of his 2 missiles.

It was perhaps wise of the Forrestal's Admiral Smith to keep his aircraft clear of a gung-ho idiot such as Rogers, whose trigger-happiness was well known. However, his own crew suspected that the target was a commercial airliner, but it seems that they didn't pass this information to the Vincennes. It probably wouldn't have done any good if they had though, as Rogers was surrounded by confusion of his own creation.

I wonder whether Rogers has ever thought about the 290 innocent civilians he killed by his inept behaviour.

I heard a very loud sonic boom Wednesday afternoon (loud enough to make the house shake) at approx. 1400A, I'm guessing it was a French interceptor heading West.

Thanks gents - any pictures?

Heathrow Harry wrote,

Yes. When the Tu-95s use the North Sea route and come down far enough. The Netherlands claimed last year that Tu-95s had encroached inside their airspace and were escorted out.

Dutch fighter jets intercept 2 Russian bombers in their airspace - CNN.com

On rare ocassions the Luftwaffe QRA also get a chance over the North Sea. On 11th September 2012 Luftwaffe F-4 Phantoms were scrambled for the Tu-95s.

Dutch F-16 footage from 2011 of a Tu-95MS Bear H over the North Sea.



Even the Portuguese had a visit from the Bears in late 2014.

http://www.cavok.com.br/blog/wp-cont...1/x26_2091.jpg

Minor pedant point guys; The CVA in the Hormuz tragedy was the Forrestal :8

Intercepted Russian bomber was carrying a nuclear missile over the Channel | UK | News | Daily Express

one Bear carried a nuclear ASW missile, the other was monitoring the exercise. Comint probably intercepted in Vardo, northern Norway; Nato knew what's going on long before the aircraft were anywhere near UK airspace, and the Russians know Nato knows ;)

How do we know it was carrying a nuke? Just because they said they had one on board doesn't mean they did?

That Portuguese F16 pilot looks far more interested in his camera ship than he does in the Bear he's supposed to be intercepting

See also

http://www.pprune.org/military-aviat...nemouth-2.html

I have put an animation there showing the path of tanker and Typhoon
in the Eastbourne area.
The red line is the UK FIR boundary

I may be getting cynical in my old age but:

Defence secretary makes a speech saying he is planning to sell off surplus RAF airfields
Within a couple of days, a relatively routine QRA incident appears in the papers as if WW3 is about to kick off, and only the RAF can keep us safe

Coincidence?

(And if not, three cheers for whoever thought it up)

Some HF voice recordings from the 28th January 2015 mission. Tu-95 Bear or IL-78 Midas at the following link. The aircraft used a combination of Voice and Morse to pass encoded messages.

https://planesandstuff.wordpress.com/

Agreed, we can't know, we're just reading the newspaper. And frankly, the amount of spelling mistakes and misunderstandings there is more worrying to me than Russian bombers:

and the "nuclear missile" is most likely a reference to some kind kind of air-dropped torpedo (I have yet to see a flying submarine).

A View of the Interceptors from the Intercepted
 

All this excitement about QRA’s and intercepts of potentially hostile aircraft had me rummaging around in my album for photos taken in 1980 of what is seen of the interceptor from the intercepted aircraft.

There we were trundling along at 20,000 ft over the middle of the Indian Ocean miles from anywhere, en-route from Sri Lanka to Seeb (Muscat) when an American voice came over the UHF emergency frequency asking us to look out to our left. Sure enough we’d been intercepted by a couple of F-14s and F-4s from the USS “Coral Sea”.

Having identified us as RAF, we had a friendly chat and wondered why the intercept? Seems they were on constant readiness and all unknown aircraft approaching their battle group was deemed to be hostile until proven otherwise, hence the intercept. The hostage crisis of U.S. Embassy staff being held by the militant followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran was in full flow and the USS Coral Sea was on station in the northern Indian Ocean / Gulf of Oman area monitoring the situation.

Anyway a couple of photos taken at the time when being intercepted by US Navy fighters are attached.

http://i145.photobucket.com/albums/r...erc6Medium.jpg


http://i145.photobucket.com/albums/r...erc1Medium.jpg


http://i145.photobucket.com/albums/r...erc3Medium.jpg


http://i145.photobucket.com/albums/r...erc4Medium.jpg


http://i145.photobucket.com/albums/r...erc5Medium.jpg




http://i145.photobucket.com/albums/r...erc7Medium.jpg

I agree, it doesn't really matter what they were carrying on board the aircraft, as long as they don't make any attempt to penetrate UK airspace without clearance. If they did that, then it's a different story, but so far I've seen no evidence of their activity suggesting hostile intent, or conspiring to commit a hostile act at a later date (news articles aren't really evidence).

Weapons get tested all the time, and the RAF are not squeaky clean in that they don't have any weapons (or something that can be construed as a weapon) fitted to the pylons in international airspace, when they aren't going to war or returning from war. Look at the Typhoon pictures from this year when they were en route to the USA. Each aircraft had an inert weapon system on at least one of its pylons, so what's stopping another country from doing the same? It's perfectly legal to do as long as you don't attempt to enter another's airspace without permission, and your actions aren't threatening.

Warmtoast, brilliant images! Thank you.

F-4 is soo much better looking than the F-14.

"...American voice over UHF emergency freq..." The same way they tried calling the Iran Air Airbus, with its "refusal" to respond reinforcing its designation as hostile.

Having been on the receiving end of a challenge by a USN warship in the pre-dawn Indian Ocean (or it could have been one of half a dozen other airliners innocently following their flightplans) I can tell you it concentrates the mind!

Given that CV43 never operated the F14, looks like you had a visit from CVW15 from the USS Kitty Hawk as well. The Marine F4 was from CVW14 on the Coral Sea.

On second thought, I am not going to go down this rat hole. I see a (political) distinction you don't, so be it.
@ West Coast: a collision is a risk of the game being played, just as it was during the Cold War when this was a routine deal. The game is political, and the topic is willy waving and "probing" just as before. Same Stuff, different day, no big deal, for professionals. For journos and hand wringers ... what isn't a big deal? We live in the age of drama queens.
Wrong, Beags. It was in the PG and at that location due to its mission.
The argument on whether or not Vincennes should have done what it did is another matter (to include the wisdom of engaging in that particular surface action) which I note has brought the usual suspects out, and the usual amount of utter tripe. For example, your fellow traveler:
A lot of wrong in one paragraph.
He also forgets that the USN had a certain paranoia in the Persian Gulf at the time due to the previous year's USS Stark attack, a lethal mistake by Saddam's air force ... or so the Iraqi story went.
The criticism of the Captain within the USN was considerable.
USNI Proceedings, which was once a journal where a lot of professional discussion/debate etc went on had numerous articles pro and con, the CO of the USS Sides being not the only one who was very critical of Captain R.
Further criticisms of some of the outright crap posted on this topic is edited in an effort to remind self, and others, that this thread is about Russians flying near to the UK's air space.

Not a boffin

Thanks for the clarification - it was a long time ago!

Fair point, lonewolf in as far as dragging us off the case of the USN. But when you say "no big deal for professionals..." the trouble is, it wasn't military professionals who bore the brunt of the sudden reroutes caused by the Channel portion of this willy-waving adventure. There are huge tracts of the world to play Cold War posturing to everyone's hearts content but it's not reasonable to expect the general public, families travelling with children to shoulder needless risk.

Deptrai,

http://www.pprune.org/8849076-post61.html

The journalist, Marco Giannageli, has a recent history of ludicrous stories. He claimed Russia was about to supply Argentina with Su-24 Fencers. I've just checked and he is still peddling the bogus Su-24 story!

December 28th, 2014

Falkland Islands defence review after military deal between Russia and Argentina | UK | News | Daily Express

January 18th, 2015

Falklands latest: UK sends MOST POWERFUL warship to Falklands to strengthen defences | UK | News | Daily Express

Februaty 1st, 2015

Falklands on HIGH ALERT: Hundreds of UK troops sent to boost security at Argentina threat | World | News | Daily Express

ShotOne, are you referring to the Airbus FBW, 777 landing features on VFR days, or something else? :}

I don't see how the Russian planes playing willy waving games near UK airspace somehow becomes that Pax taking on added burderns.

I do see the points made earlier on them making ATC's job harder.

In that case allow me to explain, lonewolf. The airspace over the channel is very busy. If a large corridor is suddenly rendered off-limits by an uncooperative aircraft, hundreds of aircraft under several different control authorities have to be rerouted or delayed on the ground. ATC did a superb job, but cranking the pressure on certainly increases the risk of calamity.

I perhaps do not see the severity level as you do, thanks for taking the time to explain so succinctly. :ok: