Two RAF fighter pilots have revealed the tense moment when they discovered that a suspicious unidentified aircraft over the Middle East was one of Russia’s biggest military jets.
Speaking about the incident afterwards, one of the pilots, named as Flt Lt Josh, says: ‘We don’t want the Russian military aircraft to get too close as it could get very dangerous, there is risk of escalation.’.
A detailed log of the jets’ movements was passed on to British military intelligence by the pilots, whose squadron is based at RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire and also protects UK airspace.
The Typhoon aces tracked the transport aircraft while on a sortie to identify any insurgent activity near a US military base in Jordan which had been hit with a drone launched by a militia group.
The incident is revealed in Top Guns: Inside the RAF on the same day that Moscow sent Tu-95MS nuclear-capable strategic bombers close to Ukraine’s borders with NATO, causing alarm in Poland.
