The jets were alerted for a second time on Friday afternoon for a similar reason when a Moscow-Belgrade flight reported a bomb threat.Continue reading
An unidentified aircraft was detected on radar in the late evening hours of May 3, prompting the Hungarian Armed Forces Air Defense Service to be alerted and launch a Gripen fighter jet from the Air Defense Readiness Service, the Defense Ministry said in a statement.
This article was originally published on our sister-site, Ungarn Heute.
Radar equipment detected the signal around 10 p.m. near the border in the eastern part of Hungary. No aircraft was found, but the plane stayed and patrolled the area for a while before returning to the Kecskemét base, MTI reports.
As we reported before, since the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war, Hungarian Gripen fighter jets have had to be alerted several times: on March 14, the Hungarian Defense Forces were alerted to a Serbian-registered aircraft on the Belgrade-Moscow route. The Belgrade control tower informed the civil air traffic control that the aircraft was carrying a bomb, and the Hungarian fighters were called in because of another bomb threat. Later, air defense was alerted to a bomb threat on a civilian aircraft flying under the Serbian flag from Belgrade to St. Petersburg.
Featured photo illustration by Sándor Ujvári/MTI