In just a few minutes, two Typhoons intercepted and identified three Russian fighters. Early on Thursday, 26 April, two Italian Eurofighter Typhoon fighters from the Air Task Force
36th Wing, deployed in Estonia, were scrambled by an order from NATO’s Combined Air Operations Centre (CAOC) in Uedem (Germany) to intercept three unidentified aircraft within Baltic airspace. Within a few minutes, the two aircraft reached the unidentified tracks, which subsequently turned out to be two Russian Federation Sukhoi 35 “Flanker” fighters and a Sukhoi 24 “Fencer”, which had not filed a flight plan and were failing to communicate with air traffic control agencies. The three Russian aircraft were intercepted by the two Italian Eurofighters which, as ordered by the NATO CAOC in Uedem, carried out the standard VID (Visual Identification) procedures, escorting the three Sukhois out of Baltic airspace. This brings to fourteen the number of scrambles carried out by the Italian aircraft, which have been deployed to the military airfield in Ämari, Estonia, since the beginning of January, as part of NATO’s enhanced Air Policing operation to guarantee the integrity and security of the airspace of the Baltic States.
Indeed, in 2004, with the entry of the Baltic States and Bulgaria into the Atlantic Alliance, the airspace of those countries became an integral part of the Euro-Atlantic area and, as such, was included in NATO's air and missile defence system. This system also includes the activity of
Air Policing, that is, the continuous air surveillance aimed at ensuring the integrity and security of NATO's airspace, which, starting in 2014, it was decided to reinforce specifically in the Baltic countries thanks to air contributions provided on a rotational basis by the other countries of the Alliance.
The “scramble” is the operational activity consisting of the rapid activation of a pair of fighter jets in order to intercept and identify an unknown aircraft violating the Alliance's airspace, so as to guarantee the security of the skies against any eventual and potential threat.
