UK Leads Crimean Air Reconnaissance Operations Against Russian Air Defenses

A Royal Air Force Boeing RC-135W aircraft operating over the Black Sea on Wednesday played cat and mouse with Russian forces for almost four hours as it probed Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula air defenses. At one point it switched off its transponders, effectively disappearing from civilian radars for more than an hour offshore from the major Russian base of Sevastopol.

The mission only ended after a Russian Sukhoi-27 (NATO: Flanker) fighter caught up with the British four-engine aircraft, based on Boeing’s C-135 Stratolifter airframe, along with its two fighter escorts in international air space.

Air traffic data reviewed by Kyiv Post confirmed the RC-135W with the call sign RRR7224 took off from Waddington, England and flew across Europe before reaching the Black Sea at about 11:00 Universal Metric Time (UMT).

Two RAF Typhoon Eurofighters launched from Mihail Kogălniceanu airport, a NATO air base near the Romanian port city of Constanta, tailed the Rivet Joint, flying escort patterns ranging close-in, at 50 kilometers (31 miles) distance, flight data showed.

A Cold War-era spy plane continually updated by Boeing, the RC-135 is crammed with electronics designed to detect and fix the location of radars and transmitters. Its main use is to gather data on the location of enemy air defense systems. NATO routinely operates RC-135s over southeastern Romania, but only rarely deploys the unarmed planes over the Black Sea, according to open-source flight tracking data.

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Europe’s press analyses the operation and its potential consequences.

Typically, the surveillance aircraft has a 20–25-person flight crew and equipment technicians. The last time NATO mounted a deep penetration manned flight towards Crimea, was on June 28, when an RAF RC-135 operated some 200 kilometers from the occupied peninsula. That mission also included a fighter escort but was not approached by Russian aircraft.

On Wednesday, the British spy plane and its two escorts appeared to have flown somewhat closer to Crimea than during the June mission, prompting the Su-27 fly-by.

Russia’s Defense Ministry published video it said was recorded from inside the cockpit of its interceptor on Wednesday evening. According to an accompanying Kremlin statement, the three RAF aircraft “approached to a dangerously close distance” and turned back once the armed Russian jet made an appearance.

Solid confirmation of how close the RAF’s planes got to Crimea and their flight paths was complicated by their distance from shoreside radars, and the disappearance of all three planes from civilian radars for more than an hour, flight tracking data showed.

The Russian military blogger FighterBomber, who is a de facto unofficial Russian Air Force spokesman, contradicted the official account in a Telegram post, saying the British pilots just ignored the Su-27 and flew on their way. Flight tracking data reviewed by Kyiv Post also seemed to undermine Moscow’s narrative, as it showed no change in the British aircraft’s flight path or altitude.

The available flight data, suggests that NATO air operations attempted to make Russian tracking and intercept of the British planes more difficult throughout the mission, by employing various airborne tricks.

At the same time as the Rivet Joint headed out from the Romanian coast, the usually little-used airspace was being used by a US Navy Poseidon maritime patrol plane, three Romanian civil air helicopters flying search and rescue patterns, and a civil Airbus 321 airliner flying, a little strangely, in tight circles with no apparent clear destination.

Any attempt to track the UK’s three-plane reconnaissance element as it headed out to sea was likely made more difficult for Russian air defense radar operators. Kyiv Post concluded there isn’t enough evidence to confirm whether all those planes were intentionally in the same air space or by accident.

In contrast with the June reconnaissance flight, during which the two Typhoon escorts remained close to the RC-135 and each other throughout their patrol towards Crimea, Wednesday’s mission saw the fighters with call signs NightWing11 and12 fly as much as 80 kilometers apart.

As the larger, four-engine spy plane proceeded east towards Sevastopol, the fighters made detours southward, at times swooping into airspace north of Turkey, close to civilian flight paths used extensively by civilian aircraft traveling between Europe and the Middle East.

Roughly halfway through the Rivet Joint’s nine-hour flight, the UK aircraft adopted another deception tactic when they disappeared from civilian radars at a point some 150 kilometers southeast of Crimea. The most common reasons for such disappearances are increased distance from ground radars or a decision to switch off the aircraft’s transponder.

It was nearly 90 minutes later before the RC-135 reappeared on civilian radar when it was more than 120 kilometers north of the position from where it vanished. It seems likely that the spy plane and its escorts, flew parallel to the entire length of Crimea’s west coast, the site of some of Russia’s most sensitive air defense installations.

After reappearing on radar, the three British planes turned west and headed for home. The Typhoons dropped off radar again near Constanta at 13:30 UTC and 30 minutes later the Rivet Joint cleared Romanian air space en route to Britain. By 14:15 the US Navy Poseidon was over Bulgaria heading towards Sicily, and the three Romanian helicopters had disappeared as well.

In his assessment of the operation, Fighterbomber repeated the common Russian complaint that the Kremlin needs to do something about NATO reconnaissance flights near Crimea. He claimed that targeting data collected by NATO spy planes is turned over to Kyiv, meaning every time an RC-135 or another surveillance aircraft flies a sortie near Crimea, within 24-72 hours Ukrainian long-range missiles or drones pound Russian anti-aircraft missile batteries or radar somewhere in the peninsula.

“[A British plane] chock-full of reconnaissance equipment, accompanied by a pair of fighters. The whole world sees this. The whole f*cking planet can see it online,” the former Russian military pilot said. “It flies to reconnoiter targets that will be struck tomorrow, well, at most, the day after tomorrow… Everyone knows why they’re [the RC-135 and Typhoons]) are up there and what will come next.”