NATO hurled its airborne muscle into the skies over the southern Balkans yesterday to show that Western diplomacy aimed at resolving the Kosovo crisis was backed by military power.
"The mission went like clockwork," said Lieut-Gen Michael Short, the US commander of allied air forces in southern Europe, as the thunder of returning warplanes drowned out his voice in a cavernous hangar at Aviano Air Base in northern Italy.
"It was a superb demonstration of NATO air power."
The NATO Secretary-General, Mr Javier Solana, hailed the exercise by 85 aircraft assembled from 15 NATO bases as a success.
In a four-hour display of its ability to dominate the skies over the southern Balkans, NATO's armada carried full payloads as it soared over Albania and Macedonia, Kosovo's anxious neighbours.
Although two mission leaders were turned back by systems failures, they were replaced by designated substitutes.
"It seemed extremely quiet out there," said Lieut-Col Dennis "Fish" Prokopowicz, a US airforce fighter pilot veteran of 17 years.
"This shows we have great resolve and we are ready to do this, although we don't want to," he said, referring to NATO's threat to carry out air strikes if President Milosevic does not pull army and special police units out of the restive Serb province of Kosovo.
Gen Short said NATO's 68 combat aircraft, backed by 17 support planes circling over the Adriatic Sea, "flew no closer than 15 miles" to the borders of Yugoslavia - well out of sight of anyone on the ground in Kosovo - and there was no jamming or counter-jamming of radar.
The sun was well up over the jagged peaks of the Dolomite mountains when the first pair of F16s, both Portuguese, roared off from the Aviano base to give operation "Determined Falcon" its teeth.
British and French Jaguar ground-attack planes, German Tornadoes and F-16s from Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Greece, Turkey and Denmark joined the airborne phalanx, sweeping down over the sea between Italy and the Balkans and on across the mountains of Albania and Macedonia.