Aerial interceptions are common. Collisions are vanishingly rare
had barely risen over the Black Sea on March 14th when two Russian Su-27 “Flanker” jets began following the American, more commonly known as the Reaper, 50 nautical miles south-west of Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula occupied by Russia since 2014. The Reaper had made that trip hundreds of times over many years. So too had the Russian jets.
America and its allies routinely fly drones and crewed aircraft over eastern Europe and the Black Sea to collect intelligence on Russian military forces in Crimea and other parts of Ukraine. The planes flew over Ukraine until the war began; now they skirt its borders. Publicly available tracks ofsurveillance flights between September and November, an illustrative period, show intense activity from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south .
The aims are to intimidate the plane or drone operator, forcing the aircraft to change course, and to deter future flights. Similar encounters occur in the Pacific. In June last year Australia accused a Chinese jet of releasing flares in front of an Australian plane over the South China Sea.
In the latest encounter, American officials say that the Su-27s conducted 19 close passes and sprayed jet fuel on the Reaper, possibly to obscure its sensors. On the last pass, one jet struck the Reaper’s rear propeller forcing its controllers to glide it into the water . The officials say the Russian behaviour was “unsafe”, “unprofessional” and “juvenile”—but that the collision appeared to be unintentional.
In large part, this game of aerial cat and mouse is neither new nor uniquely dangerous. There were tens of thousands of intercepts after 1945, notes Robert Hopkins, a former
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