"Stop SPAM" wrote in message
...


Rusty -

This has been extensively discussed here in the past; go back, for
example, and search around the time a US recon plane was forced down in
China after colliding with a Chinese fighter.


In international airspace

The Soviets didn't need to do recon flights using sophisticated
dedicated planes, so there is little in the way of "incidents" in the
same sense.


So if they didnt do recon flights what were all those Soviet aircraft
flying along the British coast doing ?

Since the US is a free country, they can drive up to the gates, take
pictures, drive to a nearby hill, take pictures, rent a chopper and do a
near-by fly-by and take pictures, rent a nearby apartment and watch and
count traffic... see a pattern here? A free country means it is much
easier to conduct the type of recon that required the US to use recon
overflights over communist, closed countries.


The reality is that Soviet 'civilian' aircraft were know to 'stray'
from their flightpaths from time to time but recon birds were
supplanted by satellites.

Keith