US or British jets intercepting Russian bombers

Factual Questions
1

It seems that several times over the last few month Russian bombers have approached US and British air space.

What exactly does it mean when the reports say the bombers have been “intercepted”?

Do the US jets literally fly in front of them and if the bombers continued to fly in the direction they were flying, the bombers would crash into them? It seems like a very dangerous game of chicken. What if the bombers just keep going?

It seems to me that when the Russian bombers turn around and head home that it is a humiliating experience for them. They look like little doggies who got caught doing something they shouldn’t have and are now running away with their tails between their legs.

I know the Russians are only testing response times, but what a stupid and dangerous game.

Am I missing something?

2

I never got to do it for real, but I did train for it.

Presumably the Russians now (Soviets then) had a preplanned route they intended to fly that would take them into the ADIZ (Air defense identification zone - Wikipedia) but not into actual allied sovereign airspace. In other words, under international law they were exercising what’s called the right of innocent passage. Civil and military ships and aircraft have the right to use the high seas and skies outside of the territorial boundaries provided they aren’t actively creating a hazard.

Our job was to launch off, fly up to them & follow alongside watching them and making certain they knew we were right there. And all the while we’re implicitly threatening that they’d be dead in seconds after they went too far towards our airspace border, opened weapons bay doors, or did anything else too overtly unfriendly.

There are procedures, which the US and many other countries use all the time, for military flying through international airspace without any awareness of our presence by any ATC. The military shoulders the burden of avoiding running into anyone which they mostly do by operating at altiudes or in parts of the world that have few airliners.

A problem nowadays with the international airspace surrounding Europe is that it’s so full of airliners that even over so-called international waters it’s difficult to perform innocent passage without causing a hazard to others’ navigation. Fighters with air to air radar can do a good job of avoiding even dense civilian traffic.

But the Russians have been very eager to fly bombers, which have no effective air-to-air sensors, through high density airspace just to prove they can. It’s a game of chicken, both at the airplane-to-airplane level and at the country-to-country diplomatic level. Somebody is going to get hurt one of these days.

3

“Intercepted” just means flying out to meet them and getting close enough that you could, if you wanted to, start firing at them. Usually you make sure to let the other guy know that you’ve caught him, so he knows, and you know, and he knows you know, and you know he knows you know, so that unfortunate events don’t happen by accident. Or you could intercept and not let them know, if you don’t want them to know that you know. But maybe they know anyway and are just pretending not to know.

The point of all this is to test your ability to get close to the enemy and see how long it takes for them to respond, and how they respond. And you respond so you can test how long it takes for you to respond, and you can see what sort of stuff he’s flying over. Or you could be taking pictures, much more important in the days before satellites. And of course, NATO countries fly over or near or around Russian and Chinese territory all the time.

4

The interceptor just flies up beside them and flies alongside them until they leave the area. They could potentially be shot down if they violated our airspace but they’re not going to violate our airspace, they’re just cruising by. Everyone does it. US planes get intercepted by Russians too. It’s not humiliating, they knew they would be “caught” before they got in the plane. I imagine most crew see intercepts as a cool chance to get some photos of the other guy’s plane.

Theaviationist.com posts lots of intercept photos and videos, including this one today.

5

Is it just me, or is that commie bomber one beautiful aircraft? Wow!

6

No, it’s not just you. It looks like a better-styled Concord, as opposed to some hulking B-52.

7

Flying deliberately into the enemy’s Air Defence zone can reveal lots of useful information, their RADAER signals, their intercept response times, procedures etc, which can be employed against them when its time to do it for real, so hardly humiliating.
US B-52’s do similar things.

8

It looks a lot like a slightly more angular B-1: Rockwell B-1 Lancer - Wikipedia

I’m not asserting copycatting in either direction, just that they both had/have a similar mission profile and then-current state of the art when designed.

9

B1A I would say. It was supposed to be a bus for long range ALCMs like the B1A as opposed to the low level penetrator like the B1B?

10

I’ve long thought both the Badger and the Bear were nice looking aircraft. Of course, I also thought the N-1 was a nice looking rocket sitting on the pad.

11

Russia makes some beautiful planes. I think they’re winning the war in looks in fighter aircraft with the Fulcrum and Flanker family. The F-15, 22, and 35 look bland in comparison.

12

We cannot allow Russia to dominate free world in allure. We must close to looks gap.

Peace through style.

The Japanese are playing to their national strength and have already started upgrading their aircraft to be kawaii

On the US and Russian versions, is the supersonic capability only meant to increase the vulnerability window when exposed to AA weapons and get out of its engagement envelope faster? I can’t think of many other sensible uses of supersonic bombers but perhaps you can.

What kind of stealth and EW capabilities do you think it has?

I am quite curious about the tactics and politics of that. Could you go on?

Is Russia running intelligence planes near other countries like the US did in the Hainan Island incident?

13

I worked with a guy who was retired Navy. He was a CAG* on a carrier and often described little antidotes of encounters with Soviet planes. I never knew that opening the bombay doors (bomber) when approaching a carrier was considered an act of war for instance. The Soviets never did that as far as he knew.

Also, they knew well in advance of a inbound Soviet plane, but they never did anything about it until a certain distance so as to never fully give away our tracking abilities.
It’s a cat and mouse game. A way of saying “we’re here, your it.”

*CAG, Commander, air group, it’s a senior position on a carrier. Typically one that eventually leads to command of an Aircraft carrier

14

Kawaii? Not a term I’m familiar with.
On the US and Russian versions, is the supersonic capability only meant to increase the vulnerability window when exposed to AA weapons and get out of its engagement envelope faster? I can’t think of many other sensible uses of supersonic bombers but perhaps you can. …
[/quote]
Fighter interceptor tactics depend on the fighter being significantly faster than the bomber. A fighter with a Mach 0.9 cruise and M1.5 dash can readily defend a large area against M0.7 bombers. Have the bombers be able to cruise long-term at M1.5 and suddenly the fighters’ defensible area shrinks drastically. So now the defender needs 3 or 4x as many fighters and bases to defend the same perimeter. As well, a successful intercept relies on getting out in front of the incoming bomber then timing a turn around to end up nearby goingthe same direction and speed. The fighter pilot fixes any mistakes in the set up or timing using his superior speed. If he doesn’t have superior speed, then any slight mistake or non-optimal setup results in him watching the bomber sailing serenely on to its target with the fighter trailing haplessly behind just out of weapons range. If the bomber can really dash then by careful use of maneuver & speed the bomber can pretty well ensure every fighter will “miss the intercept” if the bomber knows (via ESM or EO sensor) that he’s targeted.

Speed also complicates the attack problem for SAMs & AAA by shrinking the warning & engagement envelopes, but not to the same degree as it hits fighters.

Speed also strains the defender’s C[sup]3[/sup] systems. (Made up numbers ahead) With an incoming Bull Tupolev Tu-4 - Wikipedia, we’d have, say, 2 hours from first detection to weapons release. For a Bear, make it 45 minutes. For a Blackjack or Backfire it’s more like 20 minutes. To detect, track, fuse, decide, select counter forces, alert those forces and launch them all takes time.

Stealth? None. EW? I have no knowledge. A typical combat bomber would have jamming for search & track radars, RWR to know whether it’s targeted, and maybe ESM recorders for intel purposes. A peacetime probing bomber would for sure have ESM recorders, and would not exercise its jammers.

Russia is said to be just starting to come out with some very advanced EW gear. The odds on that being integrated into the elderly TU-160 fleet is very small IMO.

Russia, China, and the US, as well as lots of other countries run intel aircraft & probing flights along airspace borders and have since WWII ended. At various times the volume and edginess of the encounters has waxed and waned. The same thing is done with naval ships.

After some nasty incidents in the mid-60s a treaty was agreed on some basic rules of the road. Incidents at Sea Agreement . There’s a corresponding set of side agreements applying to aviation. Everybody wanted to probe the opposition and poke them in the ribs a little bit, but everybody also wanted to avoid an inadvertent live fire incident that might back the other side into two-tits-for-tat escalation.

As of today the Chinese are having problems restraining some of their vessels and aircrew. As best I’ve read in open sources, the current Russian stuff is well-disciplined.

A separate matter to the military-to-military encounters is the inherent danger all this shenanigans poses to civil aviation. And in this I understand the Russian leadership are currently being downright reckless. The frequency, routing, and duration of these missions are decided at a pretty high level; the crews just go fly as ordered. And this high level is intent on demonstrating that the Russian government and/or military simply do not care about any civil considerations. They’re just being Klingons about the whole thing.

15

Late edit: I bunged up the quoting, but I think you can parse it.

16

There was definitely ‘copycatting’, aka theft of design thru espionage, and it was always on the Soviet’s side. The basic design of the Tu-160 Blackjack is almost identical to the US B-1 Lancer and the B-1 came first. Of course, aircraft that are designed for similar missions are likely to have similar designs. The Tu-95 Bear, though less of a copy, was the Soviet counter to the US B-52.

Put it this way: If the US had not pursued the B-1 the Soviets wouldn’t have the Tu-160. They were/are the ones almost always playing catch-up.

17

Wouldn’t the US military want to “fake” its response time? Say its real response time would be 8 minutes, but by intercepting the bombers in 10 minutes, the Russians would take away erroneous intelligence from the encounter.

18

Its not that easy to fake its not like the Russians don’t already have a very good idea of what the US/UK/China’s capabilities. Plus you never know, if this might be i) an actual attack and ii) the longer they are there the more intelligence information they can pick up.

19

Ahhh, why would you want to make the response time seem longer?! Unless you’re already engaged in an actual shooting war you always want your enemy to believe you’re stronger than you are, not weaker.

20

I presume that defending against platforms which can carry ALCMs (like many Russian bombers) would complicate this somewhat? You would want to be there faster or you will face 5 small fast targets rather than one large slow one?