REUTERS

An aircraft of the U.S. Air Force has conducted a reconnaissance flight over the Black Sea off the coast of the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula.

The Boeing RC-135V reconnaissance aircraft tail No.64-14846 call sign MITE21 took off from the Souda Bay airbase in Greece's Crete at 08:35 Moscow time. Within 10 minutes, it arrived in the Black Sea area and began a reconnaissance flight off the coast of Crimea, which lasted about three hours, Radio Liberty's Krym Realii reported with reference to Russian media.

As UNIAN reported earlier, U.S. Air Force deployed a Boeing RC-135V reconnaissance aircraft to patrol off the coast of the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula and the Black Sea coast of the Russian Federation near Novorossiysk.

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UNIAN memo. The Boeing RC-135 is a family of large reconnaissance aircraft built by Boeing and modified by a number of companies, including General Dynamics, Lockheed, LTV, E-Systems, and L3 Technologies, and used by the U.S. Air Force and UK's Royal Air Force to support theater and national level intelligence consumers with near real-time on-scene collection, analysis and dissemination capabilities. Based on the C-135 Stratolifter airframe, various types of RC-135s have been in service since 1961.