Sept. 16 (UPI) — A Russian military aircraft was detected and tracked near U.S. airspace this past weekend in the fourth such incident in less than a week, according to NORAD.
On Sunday, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, revealed that it had intercepted two Russian IL-38 military aircrafts flying in international space near Alaska’s Air Defense Identification Zone, or ADIZ, in the fourth such reported incident in five days but was “not seen as a threat,” NORAD said Sunday.
NORAD, the U.S-Canadian military alliance tasked with defending North American airspace, say the airspace in which the Russian jets were flying 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.”
The string of recent interceptions began Sept. 11 when NORAD spotted a pair of Russian military aircraft operating in international air near ADIZ but also did not enter Canadian or United States sovereign airspace, according to a release on Wednesday .