MOSCOW, April 5 (AVN) - Two groups of Kazakh fighters accomplished a training mission to eliminate manoeuvre enemy planes on Thursday, Russian Air Force Commander Anatoly Kornukov told the Military News Agency.
The fighters were guided by an aerial command post placed aboard an A-50 Mainstay airborne early warning and control aircraft, the spokesman said. They were operating under the auspices of the command post training called "Management of On-Duty Air Defence Forces and Means of the CIS Unified Air Defence System Member Nations in Conditions of Military-Political Situation Escalation in Collective Security Regions". The training is a part of the Commonwealth Southern Shield 2001 coalition exercise.
According to Kornukov, the training involves a large amount of targets represented by 37th Air Force army planes. Such flight intensity was achieved for the first time in three years. It helped check combat skills of air defence crews of the nations taking part in the exercise. Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan were involved on the multilateral basis, while Ukraine and Uzbekistan participated on the bilateral basis.
Kornukov praised Russian operative groups taking part in the training, namely command posts of the Moscow air force and air defence district, 14th separate air force and air defence army, 6th and 4th armies, 5th separate corps and forces of the Kaliningrad special district.
He stressed that the command and interaction system functions flawlessly both in the automatic and non-automatic modes. A good example is interaction between Armenian air force and air defence units and Russia's 422nd aviation group stationed in the territory of that country.