Two Russian bombers have been escorted from near UK territory – the latest in a series of similar incidents. How easy is it to spot a Russian plane, asks Jon Kelly. The Ministry of Defence insists that the Russian aircraft did not enter British airspace, which extends 12 nautical miles from the nation’s coast. But it says they were inside the UK’s “area of interest”, and the RAF scrambled Typhoon jets to intercept them. If the MoD’s account is accurate, they may have been flying too far away for ordinary plane spotters to detect them – although a woman in Cornwall claims she saw them flying inland.
