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Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia
RAF intercepts eight Russian bombers as Putin provokes West
2007-09-07
He's getting in touch with his inner Brezhnev.
The RAF scrambled to intercept eight Russian nuclear bombers heading for Britain yesterday in the biggest aerial confrontation between the two countries since the end of the Cold War. The Tupolev-95 Bear bombers were approaching in formation when they were met by four Tornado F3 fighter jets. Defence sources said that the Russian pilots turned away as soon as they spotted the approaching Tornados and did not enter British airspace.

Norway had earlier sent four F16 jets to shadow the Russians as they neared its airspace in what Moscow insisted was a training mission. The bombers had flown over international waters from the Barents Sea to the Atlantic before heading for Britain.

Russian Bears flying in pairs have triggered several alerts this year as they neared the 12-mile British airspace zone, but this was the first time that so many bombers had simultaneously tested British air defences.
Posted by:anonymous5089

#19  Thanks, ed. There's a similar thread over at Samizdata, and one of the commenters sketched out some broad comparisons between the F-15, F3, Typhoon, and the Raptor.
Posted by: mrp   2007-09-07 20:19  

#18  No. Think of it as a mini F-111. It is an attack plane (as the Germans use it) but the Brits shoehorned into the interceptor role, with predictable results. The British were offered the F-15 but decided to go with the "European" Tornado, much as they did again with Eurofighter Typhoon even though rumor has it the Brits were offered the F-22.
Posted by: ed   2007-09-07 20:07  

#17  Is the Tornado F3 superior in design to the F-15?
Posted by: mrp   2007-09-07 19:29  

#16  And why exactly all these Poles, Lithuanians and Slovaks, Bosnians coming to UK?

Chatted with a contractor working on my house today. Emigrated from the Ukraine 16 yrs ago. He talked about how many families in the Ukraine have only 1 child because the economy was wrecked by the soviets and hasn't recovered yet .... lots of fathers are working in Poland, Germany, Britain and sending home whatever money they can.
Posted by: lotp   2007-09-07 19:03  

#15  The real question here is what are the Russians try to accomplish? What message are they sending?

Another question is who is the intended audience. At least some of this is intended to raise the morale of Russians.

But Putin is KGB / GRB and never does anything for just one purpose if he can help it.
Posted by: lotp   2007-09-07 18:59  

#14  Item one: There's a Russian election coming up. Nobody's going to flank Putin's faction from the right.

Item two: Russian arms sales. It's easier to sell armaments if your military is on the perceived "offensive". A reputation for grounding your aircraft because you can't afford the maintenance is not a successful marketing tactic.
Posted by: mrp   2007-09-07 18:45  

#13  And why exactly all these Poles, Lithuanians and Slovaks, Bosnians coming to UK? How can they all be vetted? Mossies sleepers not the only sleepers, but with politicians as fast asleep as these guys, there will be nothing left to govern soon, forget the Russians.
Posted by: rhodesiafever   2007-09-07 18:04  

#12  It's the way the British do their accounting. Take the total Tornado program costs and divide by the expected flight hours and you get these crazy numbers. In contrast the US takes into account the extra fuel and maintenance required vs the bird sitting on the tarmac, about $3-5000/hour.

Same when buying equipment. The Brits use total lifetime program cost, the US the cost to procure the airframe. The British accountants claim each WAH-64 costs £60 mil ($125 mill) while the US Army was buying AH-64Ds at a flyaway cost of $15-20 mill.
Posted by: ed   2007-09-07 17:25  

#11  Have the RAF pilots turn on their fire control radars and lock on the Bears. Go through whatever maneuvers they do right before firing. If nothing else, it will raise the pucker factor for the Russkis.
Posted by: Rambler   2007-09-07 16:31  

#10  The exercise is expensive for the RAF. It costs more than £40,000 an hour to fly a Tornado F3 and yesterdayÂ’s operation will have cost at least £160,000. Underlining the scale of the operation, the RAF also sent up an airborne early warning aircraft (Awacs) and a VC10 tanker so that the Tornados could be refuelled.

Time to make this excersize much more expensive for the Russians. Splash a few of their Bears and they won't come back for more.

That's $80,000, which can't be right.

Correct:

160,000.00 GBP = 324,556.68 USD
1 GBP = 2.02848 USD 1 USD = 0.492980 GBP

Over one quarter of a million dollars just to scramble some jets. Putin needs this rammed up his tailpipe. I'm hoping some of the weapons he sells to Malaysia turn up in an atrocity on Russian soil. He sure as hell didn't learn anything from Beslan.

More like his inner Andropov.

Turn on, tune in, Andropov.
Posted by: Zenster   2007-09-07 16:14  

#9  Article: It costs more than £40,000 an hour to fly a Tornado F3 and yesterdayÂ’s operation will have cost at least £160,000.

That's $80,000, which can't be right. Commercial 737 airplanes carrying a hundred people get about $30,000 of revenues each for city-to-city shuttle flights. And commercial jets, being bigger, should be more expensive to maintain. They must be throwing everything and the kitchen sink into that cost figure.
Posted by: Zhang Fei   2007-09-07 13:31  

#8  The real question here is what are the Russians try to accomplish? What message are they sending? And what will their next step be? If one or more of those Bears, for whatever reason splashes, what then? Strange, very strange indeed. But they are .... Russians after all.
Posted by: Besoeker   2007-09-07 12:26  

#7  More like his inner Andropov.
Posted by: mojo   2007-09-07 10:45  

#6  The exercise is expensive for the RAF.

I'd say it is a bargain; real time training for their pilots and decision makers.

Plus, what would be the cost of *not* deploying the Tornados?
Posted by: Seafarious   2007-09-07 10:33  

#5  Â“virtually all of our strategic planes are being shadowed by Nato fighters”.

So it's good practice.
Plus those Bears are getting pretty old. If they keep this tempo up, I'm forseeing phrases like "metal fatigue", "structural failure" and "no survivors" in the near future. Probably get some decent pictures too...
Posted by: tu3031   2007-09-07 09:49  

#4  I would start putting SAMs on submarines. Jam the ruskie bombers then splash them from the subs. Perfect deniability since there were no traceable ships/planes in the area.
Posted by: DarthVader   2007-09-07 09:44  

#3  you would think that the russkies would think twice about arming Muslim natioms after chechnya and getting their ass handed too them in afghanistan
Posted by: here now gone tomorrow   2007-09-07 09:22  

#2  Jam their radios and splash them. When the Russkis demand answers, just tell them there must have been an accident.
Posted by: Rob Crawford   2007-09-07 08:35  

#1  TOPIX NEWS/WORLDNEWS > HINDUSTAN TIMES > CONTAINING RUSSIA:BACK TO THE FUTURE article, except that this time CONTAINMENT andor ignoring Russia may actually lead to de facto MIL CONFRONTATION WID WEST. Read - Russ is MilPol uppity/nervous about competition from USA, CHina, etal.
Posted by: JosephMendiola   2007-09-07 01:39  

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