Some excellent images of F-16s from Poland, Portugal, and Romania flying over Lithuania

The Polish Army, as the Polish Armed Forces are known, has a formidable team of professional photographers.

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These photographers regularly publish their excellent work on the Flickr account and the Combat Camera Poland YouTube channel. Last Friday, this team published a great video showing F-16s from Poland, Portugal, and Romania flying over Lithuania alongside a NATO E-3 Sentry AWACS:

Since the end of March, these fighters have been on a Baltic Air Policing mission, monitoring the airspace of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia against incursions by Russian aircraft into those three NATO countries, which lack their own combat aircraft. The fighters on this BAP mission are 12: 4 Portuguese F-16AMs are deployed at Ämari Air Base in Estonia, and 4 Polish F-16Cs and 4 Romanian F-16AMs are deployed at Šiauliai Air Base in Lithuania.

Below you can see some of the great photos of these aircraft published by Combat Camera Poland on their Flickr account. My congratulations to these Polish photographers for this great work, these are some of the best photos of F-16 fighters I've seen in many years.

Polish Air Force

The aircraft seen in these photos are armed with AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles on their side mounts and AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles under the wings. Two of them carry AN/AAQ-28(V) LITENING target designators on the under-fuselage mounts. All four aircraft have external fuel tanks under the wings. The pilots wear JHMCS helmets. Poland received its first F-16s in 2006.

Portuguese Air Force

They are armed with AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles on their marginal mounts and AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles under the wings. We also see that they carry AN/AAQ-28(V) LITENING target designators and AN/ALQ-131 ECM (electronic warfare) pods under the fuselage, and external fuel tanks under the wings. The pilots wear JHMCS helmets. One of the aircraft has a stuffed jaguar in the cockpit, an allusion to the unit of these aircraft: Esquadra 301 "Jaguares", based in Monte Real. Of these three countries, Portugal is the one that has operated F-16 fighters the longest. It received the first units in 1994.

Romanian Air Force

They are armed with AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles in their marginal mounts and AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles under the wings. They carry AN/AAQ-28(V) LITENING target designators under the fuselage and external fuel tanks under the wings. The pilots also wear JHMCS helmets. Of these three countries, Romania is the most recent operator of the F-16: it received its first ones in 2016. They wear a very nice camouflage, by the way.