According Western concept, the intruding bombers or reconnaissance aircraft were not initially shot down, they were shepherded away from the forbidden sector and at the very most forced to land. More often NATO fighter pilots contented one self with photographic shot of the intercepted planes.

Victory claims

The informations about claims in this context are very difficult to acquire. Different cases:
A few claims during official clashes.
The classified kills in places where the fighter was not allowed to be.
The forced-downs after bomber, fighter, recce aircraft or civil planes interceptions.

All the lists present the following data:
Name and (when known) first name are presented with arbitrary choice for the spelling (russian, german, arab names...).
RANK of the pilot: see the rank page for the meaning of the abbreviations and the equivalence.
According to the pages, COUNTRY, NATION for the nationality or ethnic origin, AIR_SERVICE for the air arm, are provided.
The number of victories represents usually the total of kills (individual plus shared). The shared kills are indicated when known under the form [indiv+shared]. The official score is indicated when different from the total (American and British scores of ww2 for example).
Authors of the SOURCES column are given; report to the bibliography page to find the books, articles, web pages in alphabetical order. The OTHER_SOURCES column presents the divergent scores with sometimes the author of the source.
The DETAIL column shows occasionally the type of kill, balloons, V-1s, ground kills, unconfirmed kills...
The NOTE column exposes different commentaries and for lack of space, abbreviations are used: report to the abbreviation page for their meaning.