Russian MiG-31 jets operating off Alaska, one crashes into Pacific near Kamchatka Peninsula

By
Suzanne Downing
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53

A Russian MiG-31 fighter jet has crashed into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia announced Tuesday. Kamchatka is directly across from the Aleutian Chain in Alaska.

A day earlier, the North American Aerospace Defense Command said that it had detected four Russian military aircraft operating in the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone. It’s unclear if the two incidents are related.

Pravda, a pro-government news site in Russia, says the fate of the crew is unknown but other reports say the two onboard perished in the crash. The Russian state news agency TASS has issued no statement.

The Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone is regularly breached by Russian military jets, but NORAD says they are not a threat, just require monitoring.

“NORAD employs a layered defense network of satellites, ground-based and airborne radars and fighter aircraft to tract aircraft and inform appropriate actions,” NORAD said in a press release on July 4.

In April, a Russian MiG-31 fighter jet caught fire and spectacularly crashed near the city of Monchegorsk, Murmansk Oblast, near Finland. The two crew-members ejected before the plane hit the ground.

53 COMMENTS

  1. These planes aren’t a threat. Right up until they are.

    Part of why we are where we are. Russia, China, etc are regularly in our airspace and we shrug our shoulders.

    Guess they are paying the big guy for access.

    Besides, we’re too busy trying to figure out how to make electric fighters to bother to make enough jet fuel to shadow them.

    • Your ignorance on this topic is astounding…
      I get it, you hate Biden (he sucks, we both agree there), but implying that they are paying “the big guy” for access is absurdly stupid.
      Outer ADIZ = international airspace, Russia can fly into it all they want and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it other than monitor them (either with fighters or with radar).
      They are as welcome to play in our outer ADIZ as we are in theirs – and we do, all the time. They did it under Trump. They did it under, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Reagan.
      And you know what would be cool? An electric fighter that was more capable than current fighters – it is technology we should pursue, just like we did jet engines, advanced radar, and stealth. We shouldn’t discount a new technology because it doesn’t work well *right now*, if we did that, we’d still be running piston powered fighters because early jet engines were terrible but eventually they became far superior to piston engines.

      • Apparently you don’t read the news.

        More, you’ve proven your ignorance by attempting and failing to prove mine.

        Thanks for playing. Don’t forget your consolation prize on your way home.

        • Your response is hilariously stupid – you don’t refute what I wrote at all (which refuted your stunningly ignorant claims), you just say I failed to prove you were wrong. Kinda par for the course for you, “ah, someone pointed out how dumb my argument is, I’ll just say ‘you’re wrong’ louder!”
          How is today any different than in the past, when Russia routinely flew into our ADIZ, or sailed near our coast (in international waters)?
          What kind of response do you want? Shoot them down in international airspace?
          Thank you for playing, this has been greatly entertaining!

          • I for one wish he would come up with some new content. Getting tired of reading the thanks for playing bit or don’t cry Anchorage you voted for this stuff. Throw in the public education is child abuse and you get a Kewpie doll.

        • It’s often hilarious when two people go after each other trying to measure up. One uses a metric measuring apparatus and the other uses American standard inches and the like. In the end it’s just too cocks in a ring fighting it out. Did I ever tell you I used to actually have fighting cocks and fought around the Kansas City area during the 1970s? To go Jen on you for just a little bit here, in the Bible, during the last days in the battle at Armageddon, it is sad that the enemy will come from the north. That’s got to mean Iraq Iran or Russia. I suppose we should fear them but it’s kind of hard. They are mostly inferior and like to play catch up. Supposedly the aliens aren’t going to let us destroy ourselves. That would put an end to their experiment. More than likely we will start over just like we did in the last three Extinction events. Remember your Bible and it says Adam and Eve were the first parents on the planet. Remember after Cain killed Abel, he moved away and joined another civilization that was thriving. Who were those people? Ding ding ding ding those were the aliens we have a winner. But even that Civilization destroyed itself and some left the planet and God told others to stay behind and become the “watchers.” Well they’re watching us make fools of ourselves I’m sure. Just a bunch of small fools.

      • It’s all about energy density my dude. Sure it’s worth pursuing but batteries have nowhere near the energy density of jet fuel. For that reason, we are commensurately that far away from an electric jet (meeting same performance requirements) becoming a reality. Change the requirements by orders of magnitude (quad copter with limited speed, capacity, etc.) and sure, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for an electric fighter jet capable of sustained supersonic flight with a full complement of weapons and ECM, manned or unmanned.

        • Could not agree with you more, Bill. But that’s why pursuing the technology is a good thing. Advanced batteries may never be useful in aircraft, but they may have other uses, such as ground vehicles, energy weapons, etc.
          Pursing technology, even if it seems silly or politically charged (e.g. green energy), can have future benefits. To simply discount a course of technology development because it has some political aspect (green energy) is just dumb.
          There are lots of technologies we are chasing that seem impractical or out of reach, but we get closer every year to making them viable (fusion energy).

    • Spot on, Masked Avenger! Brandon emboldens Russia and China. Probably b/c he is on their payroll. Putin knows how to take advantage of Brandon’s condition. There’s actually a lot of respect to be given to Putin, he has made Russia powerful in the eyes of the world. Unlike Brandon.
      Can you imagine how much the US would advance if we worked WITH Putin and China? DJT was willing to do that, he recognized strength and displayed it himself, and they respected him and the US because of it.

  2. Of course Russia is active along their frontier with the US. Our government is actively involved in a proxy war against them, gathering intelligence and providing targeting data to the Ukrain military. We finance the entire government, “economy” and military. We blew up the Nordstream pipeline, destroying the German industrial based economy and ecological damage to the Baltic Sea. We have military personnel in country advising and commanding operations and support their use of drones and missiles in terroristic acts against civilians. Our government targets political opposition to the regime currently in power, seeking to imprison the leading opposition candidate. We suffer from federal policy to destroy our energy supplies and de industrialize and prevent mining for essential minerals. In short we are now a nuclear armed, wreckless and unstable country involved in a hot war with Russia and spoiling for starting another war with China. Maintaining air power patrols along their frontier is unsurprising.

    • Although I cannot agree with some things you say, much of it is true. Relying on the traditional media in the US or the Biden regime for accurate information about Russia and the Ukraine war is a mistake. Keep in mind that the law prohibits the Central Intelligence Agency from operating inside the USA but the agency has no constraint when it comes to international events. I believe the CIA does all kinds of things that shape the perspectives of Americans on international happenings. Recently, the anticipated Ukrainian summer offensive has not gone as swimmingly as many Western pundits predicted. Why is that?

      More broadly, given the massive assistance being sent to Ukraine and a deepening US involvement in the conduct of the war I am surprised that Vladimir Putin has not brought the reality of war closer to Americans. If we continue to “do stuff” we should maybe think that “stuff” will be done to us.

    • When did you wake up, yesterday? We’ve been at war with Russia for a very long time. We’ve still been fighting them underwater nothing has changed. We snuck in on their Northern shore and saw a hyper missile prototype that they had been testing from under the ice. Our sub the Jimmy Carter suffered damage on its nose and this was all classified but what is it classified as the sub and everybody on there got a presidential citation for bravery. What do you think caused the damage on the subs nose has it limped back into Pearl harbor?

  3. Question :Is our Governor informed on all air traffic of National security & when ? What power does he have to intervene if our President doesn’t, to protect us Alaskans?

    • I believe (strongly emphasized)

      -as Commander of the Alaska Guard he is supposed to be informed on matters of incursion. By the fed or local military, not sure.

      -as Commander of the Alaska Guard, he can order Guard air assets out, but has no authority over active duty/serving US military.

      -such activities would almost certainly preclude use of deadly force in all but the most extreme circumstances.

      • Now just what is the ANG going to do to defend against a Mach 2+ fighter? Alaska is and always has been defenseless against the Soviets/Russians unless they mount a strategic attack against the US proper. The US doesn’t really care about Alaska except as a speed bump. You should all recognize that those Nike missiles arrayed around Anchorage and Fairbanks were nuclear armed; the US was willing to kill every living thing in Alaska including its own troops to protect its facilities.

        • The Nike missiles deployed around the lower-48 were also nuclear armed, usually. See “First Line of Defense, Nike Missile Sites in Illinois” by Gregory Kendrick.

          The Alaska ANG doesn’t have any fighters (just transports, helos and tankers). So yeah, the governor can’t do much with that – but also, it isn’t his job to track or intercept aircraft in the outer ADIZ, that’s the Fed’s job.

        • They had a range of 75 miles and ceiling of 150000 feet. They didn’t have 20 megaton warheads. Just big enough to take down a plane. A small tactical nuke at those heights isn’t going to do much on the ground, with a blast radius of a mile or so.

          • Proportionality arguments aren’t very useful when discussing nuclear weapons. Nukes are not “precise” in the real world. The response to the use of a nuclear weapon is the use of another nuclear weapon. And after that it becomes a very bad day for a lot of people. An increasingly intense proxy war with Russia brings danger. (And the best this country can do for leaders are Biden and Trump? Seriously?)

  4. Nothing new…They’ve been playing these games since WWII and the Cold War. During the 70’s, they came over quite abit and our planes just let them know, “We can play with you if you want”..they kept breaking through our barriers and when we “replied”, they always “smartly” backed off.

  6. You don’t want to underestimate your adversary, but Russia’s military is in sad shape. They lose a lot of aircraft, and pilots, due to mechanical failure. We are lucky for this, we have a president who has demonstrated he has no like or care for the American citizen (including grandchildren) with the exception being the inner circle of the Biden crime family.

    • The question is how many of our aircraft are in top mechanical condition? How well stocked in parts, tooling and munitions is the airforce if engaged in intensive combat?
      Russian air defenses are top notch, we are behind in this critical technology and our ground weapon systems are proving to not be up to a real war with a peer adversary.
      The other major issue is we have wasted NATO and our own artillery ammunition stocks. The US and NATO countries annual combined production is a fraction of what Russia fires each month.
      The same military geniuses who brought us the Afghanistan and Iraq fiascos have destroyed Ukraine in all conceivable manners and continuing to escalate this ill conceived war with Polish, Romanian, American personnel and a motley foreign legion of mercenaries.

      • Right. After they lost over 20 million people helping us defeat the Nazis, we should have gone in there and finished them off. Yeah, that sounds low and dishonorable enough for the U.S. State Department. – M.John

        • Right. More like helped themselves. Tried to take over most of China after the war was over but we had to stop them. Supplied migs to the communist. Raped and killed German women. Yeah they have no honor. Almost as bad as the Huns.

          • Choir boys? You mean the Russians? Those same Russians who still have 50,000+ troops stationed in Germany? Wait, no, I guess that would be the U.S.. Those same Russians who have 800+ military bases all over the world, but keep accusing other countries of trying to take over the world? Actually, I guess that’s the U.S. doing that, isn’t it? That same Russia who occupied Iraq and Afghanistan for 20 years, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civillians for no legitimate reason other than to feed trillions of dollars into the military industrial complex? Wait, no, I guess that wasn’t the evil Russians. Those same Russians who are known for subjecting prisoners to gruesome, inhumane torture at Guantanamo Bay? Those same Russians who are about to send cluster bombs, banned by 120 countries, to a conflict that they are responsible for starting in the first place? Wait, no. Different Choir boys.

  8. Russia may be bluffing weakness but what if they are not…?.? Another thought is if their military manpower is weak we know their 9000 + nuclear warheads are not weak. Desperation is dangerous. Never turn your back on your enemy.

    • Their ability to conduct conventional war is a bit lacking. They want to be able to move into the place afterwards, they don’t want to melt it down even it incapable of habitation for 50,000 years. Russia is well ahead of us in the hyper missile stage has is China. This worries the hell out of us so much that we risked sending a nuclear sub and some Navy seals to steal one of them so we can reverse engineer. We spent too much money and time in Afghanistan all the while the Russians and China were stealing our technology and gaining ground.

  9. We should be afraid that Russia and China are well ahead of us in the area of diplomacy. When countries like India, all the nations of Africa, and the entire middle east all gravitate towards them, european countries will follow. At that point, being the most warmongering nation in human history will not help us, financially or morally.

  10. Well something is going on. I just heard them roar like a bat out of hell. And I can tell the difference between that and just cruising around the area.
    So wait to see what happens next…

  11. What happens when Miss DNAs the Reason Russia exhumed graves is plucked out of obscurity? After collecting the monies, that one just might tell the world “I really don’t care, do you”…

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