Flights This Week “Not Seen As A Threat”

Russian military aircraft flew through the Alaskan Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) again this week on February 18-19 but the North American Aerospace Defense Command – NORAD – said these types of flights “occur regularly and are not seen as a threat.” NORAD said the aircraft were detected and tracked in international airspace, and did not enter American or Canadian sovereign airspace.

NORAD explained that "an ADIZ begins where sovereign airspace ends and is a defined stretch of international airspace that requires the ready identification of all aircraft in the interest of national security."

This latest activity occurs less than a month after multiple Russian military aircraft were monitored in the Arctic. Although those aircraft also remained in international airspace, the Canadian NORAD Region launched an air patrol to northern Canada and also from Alaskan NORAD to the area off the coast of the Alaska/Yukon border to monitor and track them.

In September 2024 there was an actual confrontation between Russian and NORAD aircraft in which a Russian Su-35 maneuvered directly in front of a NORAD F-16 and surprised the crew, who took evasive action to avoid a collision. This incident occurred in the Alaskan ADIZ and was captured on video that was widely circulated.

At the time, NORAD said the Russian pilot acted in an “unprofessional air maneuver directed at our NORAD F-16 while it was conducting a routine professional intercept of a Russian Tu-95 aircraft."

NORAD and Russian pilots often can and do perform “intercepts” that are close-but-not-too-close approaches that are intended to simply make the pilots aware of each other and are almost always done safely and without incident.

FMI:  www.norad.mil/