NATO's Baltic Air Policing transparent or...
As Scramble tries to keep track of every single military aircraft and helicopter in the world, sometimes some quirks and facts stand out. Recently, the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) had displayed some nice and awkward footages of their Eurofighter aircraft intercepting Russian aircraft while conducting mssions for the Baltic Air Policing (BAP).
Since March 2004, the BAP mission is a NATO air defence Quick Reaction Alert (QRA) in order to guard the airspace over the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Scramble has written a number of articles about the BAP in the past and keeps track of aircraft movements through news and the Scramble database. Scramble is also aware that a record number of NATO BAP mission flights were made in 2019. In total 200 flights were made in and over Baltic airspace by NATO's jets, making it an increase from 145 in 2018. The increase in missions, from Ämari Air Base in Estonia and Šiauliai Air Base in Lithuania, is mainly due to the fact that the BAP had conducted more training flights. In 2019, the number of Russian aircraft flying trough the airspace remained approximately the same as 2018. It is expected Russian aircraft movements are not to exceed the 2019 numbers.
After analysing some of the photos attached to recent published articles by the German Air Force on their Team_Luftwaffe Twitter account some remarkable things stand out. Scramble has found out that some of their published photos are certainly altered, making the Russian aircraft's RF numbers unrecognisable, before they were posted. Scramble is not aware of any BAP or NATO protocol for sharing their information and photos on the internet. Some examples. Although much more has been published by the Luftwaffe, the Russian Su-35S with Bort number 73 Red was surely altered. Having the RF number RF-81729, 73 Red is one of the well known Besovets based 159th Fighter Regiment (159 GvIAP) Sukhoi Su-35S fighters. An-72 with Bort number 45 Red has been identified as RF-90318. The Antonov transporter has been noted from Russia towards the Kaliningrad exclave and vice versa multiple times.
Although having no intelligence value, Scramble assesses that above mentioned facts are considered as such by the Luftwaffe. A small remark. the Belgian Air Force, while conducting a BAP mission in 2019, surprisingly posted some nice Sukhoi Su-34 photographs on Twitter. Those kind of photos are sometimes a revelation to hobbyists in general. Hopefully, when published, no more BAP photos will be edited in the future.
More information about individual military aircraft can be found at:
https://www.scramble.nl/database/military
Photo: Luftwaffe, Belgian Air Force, Hungarian Air Force and Polish Air Force. (And ASP & Aleksey, kindly provided by RussianPlanes.NET)