In a cramped crew room, in a building just next to the runway of the Amari airbase in Estonia, the television is showing old episodes of Friends.
Feet up on the table, coffee mugs in hand, a bit of casual banter crisscrosses the room. On the TV screen, Rachel is just back from the hairdressers, Ross is upset about something. Then an airman pops his head around the doorway and announces calmly: “Zombie heading north out of Kaliningrad.”
Instantly people are on their feet and moving next door to the Operations Room, where screens and digital maps marked “Nato Secret” flicker with streams of incoming data.
This is the Quick Reaction Force for Operation Azotize, Nato’s Baltic Air Policing mission that guards the alliance’s north-east borders where Russian aircraft regularly probe the boundaries of Nato territory.
Since April, the RAF’s IX Squadron of Typhoon fighter jets has taken over the mission lead from Germany’s historically-named Richthofen Squadron.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has forced the Nato military alliance to focus its efforts on securing its eastern borders. The aim is simple: to deter Russia from invading anywhere else, specifically a Nato country like one of the three Baltic states or Poland.
“Zombie” is code for a Russian aircraft acting suspiciously.
“That can usually be any one of three things,” explains Wing Cdr Scott Maccoll from RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland. “Either it won’t have filed a flight plan, or they’re not squawking [communicating] or they’re simply not responding to Air Traffic Control. Sometimes it’s all three.”
In this case it turns out to be a false alarm as the Zombie turns north and away from Nato’s borders.
Estonia’s Amari airbase, where the Typhoons are based, used to be a Cold War Soviet Airforce site, and in the nearby forest there is still a cemetery where Soviet pilots are buried along with the tailplanes of their old MiG-15s and MiG-17s.
Today the mission for these Nato pilots is both complicated and relentless. With Finland now joining Nato, the Baltic Sea is bordered by seven members of the Western alliance, soon to be eight when the way is cleared for Sweden to join.
But Russia still has two strategic footholds in the Baltic: its second city of St Petersburg to the east and its exclave of Kaliningrad, the former Prussian city of Konigsberg and its hinterland, a place now bristling with missiles and other military hardware.
Russian Su-27 Flanker fighters, Airborne Command and Control aircraft and cargo planes all fly continually up and down the Baltic between those two bases and beyond, keeping Nato’s air forces constantly on their toes.
“So we could be sat there, feet up on the table, having a cup of coffee, and then the next minute the alarm sounds,” says one of the younger Typhoon pilots, who asks not to be named.
“We respond to any alarm as if it’s the real deal. So we run to the aircraft, don our kit, get the engines going, strapped in, speak to the [Control] Tower, speak to Operations on the radios, get our clearance and we then we taxi out and get airborne as quick as we can.”
Inside the hangars another pilot approaches one of the Typhoons. They’re armed and “on state”, ready to scramble if needed.
Source : bbc