Israeli Air Force

An air force pilot took off in a two-seater patrol craft without permission and neither the plane nor the pilot has been located after two days, the military said Sunday. Israeli newspapers said the air force believes the pilot, a reserve captain, crashed after commandeering the plane Friday. The incident was first revealed late Saturday night. Military sources said it was the first time an Israeli air force pilot had disappeared on an unauthorized flight.

In its most serious confrontation since losing more than one-quarter of its planes in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the Israeli air force has turned for assistance to a group of bird watchers. Monitoring the enormous migratory flocks passing over Israel--the second-densest bird migratory corridor in the world to reduce the frequency of fatal plane-bird collisions, the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI) has been using a motorized glider to join the birds on their passage.

Maj. Gen. Avihu Bin Nun, 48, a pilot who has flown 500 missions, took over Tuesday as head of the Israeli air force. He replaced Maj. Gen. Amos Lapidot, 53, who held the post for five years and is retiring from military service.

Seven years ago Israel determined that the jet fighter it wanted as the backbone of its air force in the 1990s should be Israeli-designed and built.In pursuit of that goal the government so far has spent about $1.5 billion to develop the Lavi, from all accounts a good plane but not one markedly superior to the U.S.-made F-16 that the Israeli air force now relies on. Over the years, costs of the Lavi project have soared.

Several Israeli Cabinet members called Sunday for a government investigation into the Jonathan Jay Pollard spy affair, but Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir strongly opposed any probe and, with the backing of his principal coalition partners, managed to refer the issue to his "inner cabinet." "The painful issue called the Pollard affair is closed as far as Israel is concerned," Shamir told a group of Florida Jewish leaders Sunday night.