| Also submitted by tu3031. |
Aircraft and officers from Russia and the North American Aerospace Defense Command will track the civilian plane, an executive-style jet that will play the role of a hijacked civilian airliner. The goal is to test how well the two forces can hand off responsibility for the "hijacked" plane.
Also participating in operation Vigilant Eagle are both countries' civil air traffic control agencies.
Officials on both sides of the trust-building military exercise chose a mutual, modern-day interest -- the fight against terror -- to create an incident that could entangle the two countries.
"We try to anticipate any potential areas in which it might be necessary for us to launch fighter jets," said Maj. Michael S. Humphreys, a NORAD spokesman. A terrorist hijacking, he said, "is every bit as probable as any other" scenario.
It's unlikely that Vigilant Eagle was devised to deal with a specific threat, said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, which tracks military and homeland security news. The purpose is more likely a combination of confidence-building and rooting out any communication and jurisdictional problems before they crop up in a real emergency, he said.
Pike cited the Korean Air Lines flight that the Soviet Union shot down in 1983, killing 269 people. There was an "interface" problem between the U.S. and Soviets because they were looking at different information, Pike said.
"I could easily imagine (NORAD) looked at this and said, 'We don't know if we have the phone number of Russian air defense.' This is not something you'd want to improvise on the fly."
This is the first U.S.-Russia exercise involving NORAD, a U.S.-Canadian command that patrols the skies over North America, Humphreys said. NORAD's headquarters are at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado.
Vigilant Eagle calls for NORAD F-22s flown by U.S. pilots to follow the "hijacked" plane west across the Pacific until it gets closer to Russian airspace, where Russian MiG-31s take over. On the return trip east, the process will be reversed. Airborne warning and surveillance aircraft from each country will also take part.
Officers from Russia, Canada and the U.S. will be aboard the target plane to observe, along with an interpreter. For a short time during the handoff, fighter jets from both sides will be alongside the target plane.