My local BBC identified a RAF unit that launched Typhoons to intercept the Bears. Said it was RAF Lowsmouth. Anyone got an idea where it is?

The Sunday Post – a Scottish paper so they should know better – correctly identified the Typhoons as coming from Lossiemouth. Problem is that Lossiemouth is identified as a ‘Fife base’ according to them.
For our foreign cousins….The Kingdom / County / Council area of Fife is where RAF Leuchars was until 2015 and used to be the Scottish QRA base. QRA is now the Typhoons at Lossiemouth, 95 miles up the road in Moray. RAF Lowsmouth was probably identified by the same fact and spell checker!

Looking forward to when Poseidon becomes operational and RAF Lossiemouth being identified as HMS Fulmar because someone associates Maritime patrols with the Navy!

I agree and especially on a weekend! Also it makes a change from the standard Bear Hs.

Video from one of the Tu-142s. MiG-31 Foxhound at 0:36. MiG-31 at 0:56 squeezing in between Norwegian F-16 and Tu-142. 1:59 Norwegian F-35As

Looks as though they are back again. Same sort of area. Rumour from another site is they are interested in HMS Prince of Wales undergoing sea trials.

Voyager tanker on flightradar24.

https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....b724ccb912.jpg

Live feed.

https://www.flightradar24.com/data/a...z337/#24258fee

Two Tu-142 Bear F's.

The Russians are back again! UK and French QRA have been scrambled.

Sit listening to Coronavirus at nauseum on the telly or get some real flight time in. Yup I can guess what crew looking for.

Bet the sign off is "Same time tomorrow, Boris"....... followed by RAF saying "Ok Sergei"

Also keeping the French, Spanish and Portuguese QRA busy!

https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_174349.htm

Today it was 2 x Tu-160 Blackjacks.

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.

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....22725b581d.jpg
Things were much more black and white in my time!

Mog
:O

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

TBH you can probably hear then 50 miles away..................

A question for those who are nervous about those flights: do you know how intensive are NATO flights near Russian borders in north-west?

A: About 800 flights of reconnaissance aircraft and some 400+ flights of combat ones in 2019. 30% increase vs 2018 of the former and nearly double of the latter.

Whilst flying Wellingtons from Tilstock, my dad, low on fuel and the navigator unsure of their position, descended to low level, (we all know what that meant in the RAF in WW2) but failed to advise his wireless operator, who had the trailing aerial extended, which decapitated a farmers cow. I don't know why he was not courts-martialed for this offence (I believe it was on the list), nor do I know why my farther in law was not charged for putting the lead weight of one through the side of a house with a Lancaster at low level. However, my father did subsequently received a medal for this occurrence, from his crew, (I have it in my collection of the family medals) and he was subsequently awarded a bar to this medal, for landing at a disused airfield, Sleap (there is a thread on this LOL).

All aircraft flying under NATO authority do so with their transponders turned on, always. They are not a danger to commercial air traffic.

TBH there isn't a lot of commercial traffic up North whereas off S ireland.....................

The transponder issue might be a red herring. I have a faint memory from my distant past from my FC training in the 80s, that Russian military IFF/SSR was in a different frequency band from the western band and therefore would not be detected/decoded.

IMO, being fitted with the 'wrong' equipment, not being fitted with any equipment, or being fitted with the correct equipment and not turning it on, all amount to the same thing, really.

Fair point. Time perhaps to get these bad boys back into commission? :E

https://theromneymarsh.net/soundmirrors