A Royal Air Force RC-135W Rivet Joint carried out a signals intelligence mission over the Baltic region on 27 May 2026, flying from its home station at RAF Waddington and topping up from a United States Air Force tanker before heading east.
The aircraft, registration ZZ666 and using the callsign RRR7227, was tracked on publicly available flight-monitoring data departing Waddington and routing across the North Sea toward the Low Countries before continuing on toward the Baltic. Before pushing east, the Rivet Joint took on fuel from a USAF KC-135 Stratotanker in an air-to-air refuelling area off eastern England.
Tracking placed the aircraft over the Baltic at around 14:00 UTC, holding at roughly 36,000 feet as it worked an area that runs up toward the Baltic states and the approaches to Russian territory around Kaliningrad and St Petersburg.
The RC-135W is the RAF’s premier signals intelligence platform, a heavily modified Boeing fitted with sensors that detect, identify and geolocate emissions across the electromagnetic spectrum. The aircraft intercepts communications and radar signals and passes the resulting intelligence to commanders and allied partners. According to the Royal Air Force, the type is a dedicated electronic surveillance aircraft that can be employed in all theatres on strategic and tactical missions, with sensors that, in the service’s words, “soak up” electronic emissions from communications, radar and other systems.
Flights of this kind have become a regular feature of NATO’s posture along its eastern and northern frontiers since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The missions are deliberately conducted in international airspace and are routinely visible on civilian tracking sites, a transparency that serves both an intelligence and a signalling purpose.
The Baltic in particular has drawn sustained allied attention, bordered as it is by NATO members and by Russian territory at Kaliningrad, and crossed by undersea cables and pipelines that have featured in recent security concerns.
The RAF operates three Rivet Joint aircraft, all flown by 51 Squadron from RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire, having acquired the fleet from the United States under the Airseeker programme to replace the retired Nimrod R1. The type entered British service in 2014 and reached a decade of operations in 2024. It is run as a joint UK–US enterprise, with the two air forces collaborating on training, maintenance, test and evaluation, and the exchange of intelligence, an arrangement that lets the small British fleet draw on data gathered by the much larger American RC-135 force.
We need a couple more Rivet Joint aircraft to cover the regions of the world currently giving us concern. Assuming we have 3 Joint Rivet aircraft then one will be permanently under maintenance / refit on a rotational basis so 2 more would allow us to cover the Pacific, Middle East and Europe at a push. The claim that we share intelligence with the US and vice versa I take with a pinch of salt, somethings you do not share! It will be interesting to see if satellite technology and AI take over the roll electronic signal gathering in the future.