KALININGRAD, July 17 (AVN) - Foreign reconnaissance aviation is intensifying flights in the Baltic Sea area, which is being registered by the Russian Baltic Fleet air defence forces, Colonel Anatoly Anokhin, the forces chief-of-staff, told the Military News Agency.
77 out of 443 planes detected and tracked by the fleet's air defence this year were reconnaissance aircraft, Anokhin said. The figure is almost two times higher than that of 1999.
As a rule, the reconnaissance planes are following the international corridors, then go down sharply and following the terrain fly along the border at 305 km away. Simultaneously that is done by scout planes of several countries, recently the planes were Great Britain's AVACS, the US R-135 and Germany's Atlantic.
The increased intensity of the reconnaissance flights is explained in the Baltic Fleet air defence staff by the fact that the engineering and equipment level of its air defence is one of the highest nowadays. The foreign intelligence offices are testing its effectiveness in real conditions in order to uncover the location of the defence means and estimate the characteristics of the materiel used.