According to press-spokesman John Espen Lien at the National Joint Headquarters, the 21 fighter jets have identified 27 Russian aircrafts, newspaper Finnmarken reports. The last meeting between Russian and Norwegian planes took place on July 28th.
If this trend continues, there will be fewer identified Russian military aircrafts in 2010 than in the previous years. In 2009 Norwegian jets registered 77 aircrafts, while the number was almost 90 in the two years before that.
This year the identified planes have mostly been long-range crafts, often strategic bombers.
Read also: NATO fighters scrambled 38 times in 2009
Lien does not want to speculate if the number of Russian flights really is declining, or if the low number of scrambled F-16 is just a result of variations in Russian exercise pattern.
