VILNIUS - The NATO F-16 fighter jets stationed at the Zokniai airfield in northwestern Lithuania as part of the Baltic air-policing mission got their first taste of action last week when the planes were dispatched to intercept a suspicious aircraft approaching Estonian airspace.
On the morning of June 2, radar operators in Lithuania detected a low-flying plane in Russian territory traveling 160 kilometers north of Tallinn. The aircraft was identified as an IL-18, a cargo plane.
After failed attempts to contact the pilots of the plane, which was flying without a registered security signal as required by international regulations, the decision was made to deploy two F-16s to make a visual identification of the aircraft.
Before entering NATO airspace, the IL-18, which was first produced in 1959 and later became the "workhorse" of the Soviet air forces, had been followed by Finnish F-18 fighters.
Upon reaching the coordinates where the plane should have been, NATO pilots were unable to detect the aircraft.
Many Balts, however, had the chance to feel the F-16s, particularly in Riga, where the jets broke the sound barrier and rattled windows across a wide swathe of the city - a sensation many took for a lethal explosion.
At a Riga news conference held by Latvian Defense Minister Atis Slakteris on June 4, officials responsible for NATO's Quick Reaction Alert mission, which took responsibility for patrolling the skies above the Baltic states within hours of the alliance's March 29 expansion, did not rule out the possibility that the plane in question was on a spying mission.
Although the plane was believed to have been designed for civilian use, defense experts have observed the Russian military recently using such aircraft to run reconnaissance missions.
However, military officers involved in the operation downplayed the drama of the operation, which was the first time that a QRA mission had been executed since the alliance began protecting Baltic airspace.
On the other hand, the incident tested the effectiveness of the air-patrolling system.
The first alert of the unidentified plane went out from the Regional Air Surveillance Coordination Center, an analysis unit located adjacent to Karmelava Airport near Kaunas that collects radar data collected from around the Baltics to make a comprehensive picture of traffic in the three nations' airspace.
Officers at RASCC use state-of-the-art mobile radar surveillance equipment brought from Norway to combine radar pictures that peer more than 400 kilometers into non-NATO territory.
According to Lieutenant Colonel Kjetil Hjelset, an officer in the Royal Norwegian Air Force who has been serving as chief of operations at RASCC since mid-May, the operation demonstrated that NATO's QRA mission in the Baltic states was more than just empty posturing.
"It showed that the plans we have made for coordination between air traffic control in Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn worked perfectly," he said.
The Belgian F-16s, which can fly at speeds that take them from Zokniai to Estonia in under 20 minutes, were given a berth by air traffic controllers in each country as civilian traffic was diverted to allow the fighter jets through.
In accordance with protocol governing such incidents, officers who noticed the plane immediately notified a NATO combined air operations center in Germany from where the F-16s were ordered to take to the skies.
Once in air, the F-16s were directed to their target location by RASCC.
Previous to NATO's QRA mission in the Baltic states, all Baltic airspace was watched over by a combined Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian mission based in Karmelava, while each country was responsible for defending its own territory.
In Lithuania, the F-16s replace the albatross L-39 cargo planes that used to be sent to intercept unidentified aircraft.
