2) Why aren't the military craft listening to the local flight channel? Aren't you supposed to monitor local traffic? Especially when flying without a transponder? It's not like you can't listen to multiple channels at the same time!
Why was the Air Force plane’s transponder turned off? This is negligence that almost killed a plane full of people and endangered a national security operation. Outrageous.
It's expected for military operations to fly without transponder, they don't want to have their location visible. But it's crazy that they're also doing it in Curacao controlled airspace without agreeing a restricted area.
Even for training they set up restricted/military areas in airspace all the time. Not doing it here, in allied (Curacao is part of the kingdom of the Netherlands) airspace is unacceptable. They could have coordinated this in the normal ways so ATC would route civilian traffic around the military operations or talk to the military controllers (who can see both types of traffic) before sending an aircraft through the shared airspace.
This isn't new, it's how military operations are done all the time.
Curacao is a few kilometers of the Venezuelan coast, but the Americans have deemed the entire ocean north of Venezuela as military operations. The people in charge probably don't even know Curacao isn't part of Venezuela.
With effectively no military and the Dutch government being an American lapdog, I doubt the people in charge need to care. They're already out there with orders to commit war crimes, shooting down an airliner or two that gets too close to their military aircraft wouldn't make much of a difference in the long run.
> It's expected for military operations to fly without transponder
It's been a problem specifically with US military aircraft for years that they just wander into other people's airspace with transponders off and expect to have it all to themselves.
We should just start shooting down anything big enough to need a transponder that is not using one. Doesn't matter who's in it, doesn't matter what it's for.
> We should just start shooting down anything big enough to need a transponder that is not using one. Doesn't matter who's in it, doesn't matter what it's for.
Maximum destructive, irreversible response.
Even if you think this is sometimes warranted, have you thought of the edge cases? You seem perfectly happy to be shot down yourself, sitting in your airplane with a failed transponder.
What's gotten into you to want to kill people so much?
It's called TDS. Blind unfiltered constant rage against Trump, and anything he might represent, as if he is the great marvel super villain.
Since this plane is military, it was obviously a plot coerced by Trump personally to destroy the sovereignty of everyone else, and he must be taught a lesson by shooting down his little toy planes.
There's alot of TDS going around, and it's hard to break it, especially if it didn't break already.
They can't declare war, that would require approval from congress. They're relying on the post-9/11 authorization granted to the president to use the military to go after terrorists and those that harbor them.
That is why this administration is leaning heavily into calling the drug traffickers "narco-terrorists" and calling fentanyl their "weapon of mass destruction". They're covering their ass legally so they can invade another country without congressional approval.
I think you have "war" confused with "blowing up people we're suspicious of". It goes perfectly with "imprisoning and/or deporting people we're suspicious of".
I served. While in basic training, the drill sergeants taught us why we salute differently than other countries (probably apocryphal) - because we've "never lost a war". I'm cheeky now and I was then, so I asked about vietnam.
"Police Action" came the terse reply. "We don't talk about that one."
Course by then I'd already signed on the dotted, so...
Real quick, I'm trying to remember a word, it's on the tip of my tongue. It's when one country uses military force in order to make another country have significant internal political changes. Just on the tip of my tongue....
We? Seems like a personal vendetta from my perspective. I in no way shape or form want to send Americans to Venezuela for the holidays to start an armed conflict.
Gotta think about economy and those sweet sweet deals bringing tons of money and power to orange clan err economy and jobs! Its all fault of mexicans after all! Anyway I am sure there can be a new resort/casino or two somewhere there
And 88 million people signaled they were fine with either candidate, by not voting. 165 million people out of 264 millions eligible voters supported this.
> don't think one can blame them, not voting can be a legit option for many reasons,
With the exception of people who have religious beliefs prohibiting voting, it’s saying that you don’t feel strongly enough about the differences between the two candidates to pick one. There are some people who can plead various hardships, but most people don’t have that excuse: it really did come down to thinking their life would be fine either way.
Nope. Sorry. From outside the US, there is just the US. We dont understand your "us vs them" tribalism nor the political divide. Every US citizen at this point is responsible for what's going on. Regardless of who you voted for. All of this is due to decades of complacency by the citizenry, it's not some sudden surprising coup.
I'm not saying the rest of the world is in the clear though. I think many countries are headed in a similar direction. Hopefully this is the wakeup call we all need to step up and arrest this slide into authoritarianism that's happening everywhere.
~60% of the 8M people that fled Venezuela are incline to support a military intervention, that number goes down to 40% estimated for those still inside, so about more than half the country want external action to get out of the dictatorship. That percentage is for external action, the percentage that voted against the dictator in the stolen election last year was calculated at 76%; so no, is definitely not just the MAGA fan base that want to see something happen.
A bad situation is not improved by an even worse one. It does speaks volumes to the desperation of Venezuelans that many would rather their own country get invaded if that rids them of Maduro.
It's funny how the French are portrayed as cowards in American popular culture, when in reality the French would've gotten the guillotines out already while the Americans... cower.
You have to own it at this stage. Even if you didn't vote for it. Particularly as that tangerine is in for a second innings. All the world wants to hear is what you're doing to fight the situation, not that it's not your fault.
Common sense would dictate that a military aircraft conducting military operations off the coast of a hostile nation tend to not want to broadcast their position to the world. So not outrageous, just unfortunate. It's extremely common.
the redcoats didn't wear colorful coats and form nice big lines because they were stupid. They beat Napolean using similar tactics. And they didn't lose to the US because of these tactics.
Maybe you should reflect on why people who have lead others in combat have decided that there should be rules to war before you declare that rules of war are a bad idea.
You jest, but even in the age of modern warfare, countries still actively declare war and formally notify the other country, even if a bit late, with a formal declaration. The notable exceptions being of course the USA and the USSR and Russia, which like to call their wars "police actions" and "special military operations".
On the other side it is perfectly visible on radar (and can be heard (and with jet having its own characteristic signature it can be tracked even by WWII microphone array like they did back then) and visible in binoculars from large distance in nice Caribbean weather), so it is hiding only from civilians. Security by obscurity kind of. That is especially so in the case of a slow large non-maneuvering tanker plane like here.
And why would a tanker plane come close to and even enter the hostile airspace?! may be one has to check Hegseth's Signal to get an answer for that, probably it is something like "big plane -> Scary!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mUbmJ1-sNs.
I can just about guarantee it has nothing to do with targeting and a lot to do with making Venezuela unsure when strikes are about to start, both for security of the forces launching the eventual strikes (if any) and to harass/wear-down Venezuelan air defenses by keeping them very alert.
If our aircaft were flying transponders-on during all these exercises then suddenly went dark, it’d signal imminent attack. This keeps them guessing. Possibly we’re even playing around with having them on some of the time for some aircraft, and off at other times.
We don’t do that with AWACS and such near Russia because we’re not posturing that we may attack them any day now, and want to avoid both accidental and “accidental” encounters with Russian weapons by making them very visible. In this case, an accidental engagement by Venezuelan forces probably isn’t something US leadership would be sad about.
I live near JBLM in Washington. I am routinely overflown by helicopters and planes (C-17s) often with their transponders off (I have an ADS-B receiver running on a VM). These are training flights that are not going anywhere outside of the Puget Sound region. For added fun, I'm also pretty close to several Sea-Tac approaches.
> is significantly more precise than what you will get with radar
Is that increase in precision much larger than the plane itself? If it's not then it couldn't possibly matter in this application.
Further radar is not a static image. The radar is constantly sweeping the sky, taking multiple measurements, and in some cases using filtering to avoid noise and jitter.
> GPS Lat & Long Barometric Altitude Ground speed & track angle Rate of climb/descent
You get or synthesize every one of those with radar as well.
Yes, ADS-B is significantly more precise than civilian primary radar returns. That's why the FAA is trying to move away from radar. The JetBlue near miss was about 150 miles from Curacao ATC which is beyond what most ASR systems cover (around half that).
Military radar is a different beast, but even then you're still trying to figure out what the returns mean. ADS-B explicitly says hey there are two aircraft in a tiny space. Civilian radar is likely not precise enough to identify two aircraft that close.
Isn't altitude information also one of the important things about ADS-B that radar lacks?
Although ADS-B is self reported and "vulnerable" to bad/spoofed info.
My CFI and I once saw ADS-B data from one of the startups near Palo Alto airport in California reporting supersonic speeds... at ground level, no less.
Edit: still have it in my email, heh. It was a Kitty Hawk Cora, N306XZ, reporting 933kts at 50'.
Even good stereopair like a WWI navy guns rangefinder, will give you all that info, of course not precise enough to lock a missile - well, transponder also wouldn't let you to anyway, and thus all that transponder precision is pointless in that context.
A missile only needs to get close enough for its sensors to take over for the final approach right? Transponder data should be quite enough for that, especially for a kc-46
Any of the methods i mentioned is enough to get missile close, except may be microphones as limited speed of sound means that the plane would have moved significantly from the observed position, though again even that would have allowed to put missile into the vicinity and in general direction.
Watching Ukraine videos there is new game in town though - relatively cheap IR cameras. Using IR, day or night, you can detect a jet plane from very large distances and just guide missile to the plane computer-game-joystick style.
Military planes often deliberately have them on; not every mission is secretive. You can often see NATO planes on FlightAware in the Black Sea clearly keeping an eye on the Ukraine theatre.
I was speaking perhaps too casually, but "military things" was meant to mean offensive operations. The kind of things where you might expect to be fired upon (or at least need to take precautions against that happening). A transponder is a homing beacon for missiles.
You watch too many movies, there are plenty of other things for the missiles to track. Transponder in civilian airspace is just how you keep planes from crashing into each other.
And they often deliberately have them off, even for training flights, at least looking at my ADS-B receivers raw output and correlating to FA/FR24/etc.
The Monroe Doctrine was about preventing colonial powers from enacting NEW efforts to reach into the Americas, not about getting rid of previous control.
"The occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects FOR FUTURE COLONIZATION by any European powers." (emphasis mine)
Yeah, you can visit the EU by… sailing a ways Northeast(ish) from Maine, until you’re just south of (a part of) Canada. And by going to the Caribbean. And South America.
unlikely, at least not during this generation. even putting aside the current admin, the US has (to put it extremely lightly) long failed to police its own and certain "allies'" behavior, which undermines the concept altogether.
at this point, there are unfortunately no "good guys" at the state level.
If a bridge gets built then destroyed, built then destroyed, built then destroyed and so on, people will stop using it. They'll also stop trusting the bridge builder.
People all over the world are already building new bridges to places like China, so even if the old ones are rebuilt, they might get substantially less use.
I always get the impression that whenever military/police have the option to turn off ADS-B, they do. Not just in the US or by US forces. Not just on sensitive flights. I don't think the toggle ever gets used.
In other news, the National Defense Authorization Act working its way through congress is trying to loosen restrictions around DCA that were put in place after a military helicopter collided with a passenger jet.
Call me crazy, but I think any time, any where, without any exceptions whatsoever, someone wants to fly a multi-ton chunk of metal, they need to broadcast telemetry in a cleartext, open standard.
I understand that this might be disruptive to people who want to drop explosives on other people, and while this disruption is a fantastic benefit, it's only a side-effect.
We have the best mid-air collisions. Noone does it better, or so people tell me. We don't do sleepy silent disappearances over the Bermuda Triangle, that's SAD!! We blow em up, BIGLY, in someone else's airspace. A great PRESIDENT knows how to WIN at mid-air collisions. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
There's a marked difference between this and the Russian one: the Americans owned their mistake and paid reparations. The Russians denied and keep denying.
Mistakes aren't good, but pretending that you didn't make them adds insult to injury.
As much as the current administration turns my stomach, previous ones are not absolved from weaseling their way out of catastrophic mistakes, either.
It's sort of funny that this thread turned into a USA vs Russia debate when they both play the same games. One of them is just slightly better at pretending like they're playing fair and friendly. My take-away from that is once an organized body, be it a country, corporation or religion, gets very large and holds a lot of power, they will inevitably start doing bad things.
Nah you don't understand. When Americans shoot down a plane, it's called "Liberation". You see, by doing so they liberate our souls from this fallen World, which is good!
The major difference being that the US crew got medals for 'meritorious service', including a Navy Commendation Medal and a Legion of Merit. Russia is not quite that ballsy over accidentally butchering civilians.
> Russia is not quite that ballsy over accidentally butchering civilians.
I don't know about accidental, but if anyone thinks Russia is not ballsy about butchering civilians, they need a refresher on Russia's wars during the last few decades. Last few years would be enough too. It's a principle of their military affairs.
Switch on the critical thinking part of your brain and go read about american war crimes, the reality is much dirtier than "we're Good and they're Evil". It's not a competition so I'm not going to start ranking armies but they all have their fair share of atrocities.
It's the first time I hear someone calls Curaçao a "nation". It's just the normal Dutch island, not even some special status territory. Yes, it's in Carribean, but why do they omit "Dutch" and call it a "Carribean nation"?
I find words in the same category as "country", "nation", "state", etc are increasingly used interchangeably. Largely because they tend to be far more specific than people mean to be... but also because generic terms like "polity" never caught on in the mainstream. A similar thing is how "nation-states" would appear to be the only type of place worth worrying about highly organized attacks from in infosec, until you ask them to define what they consider a nation-state.
That said, I don't think it's accurate to paint Curaçao as just another normal Dutch island the same as any other. It's really a constituent country that's part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, just not a sovereign state or a nation.
A nation-state is a state whose borders and (originally) citizenship are largely defined by a singular nationality. Israel and Japan, for example. Belgium and Canada are not nation states: they are split into French and Flemish, and Anglo and French nationalities, respectively.
It is a 19th century term that rarely applies these days, but still sees some residual usage.
To complete the other half of the story for those not familiar: most all infosec references to "nation-state attack" instead use it to mean "government backed attack" (regardless if a nation-state is involved in the context).
It's hard to use them consistently because there isn't a single universally accepted definition.
Most people would consider the Netherlands a "country", but now we have a country within that country. Israel is a state, Japan is a state, but there are 50 states in the United States. "[People's] Republic of XYZ" generally refers to a sovereign state, but Russia has republics inside. You can't just call something what the locals call it and expect that your readers will get the picture. Even worse, people are often deeply divided as to what a given territory should be called.
So I will generally forgive journalists for picking a neutral-sounding, ambiguous expression in cases like this. What matters here is that the Dutch control this airspace, regardless of Curaçao's status within their kingdom.
What do you mean "all the way across the ocean". From where? The distance from Curaçao to the Dutch people is exactly zero.
What "right" are you talking about, is there an agency where we file a claim, and it issues us "rights"?
All people from all nations, tribes and states came from somewhere, sometimes even replacing the local population. Sometimes peacefully, like Anglo-Saxons pushed out local Britons in England, sometimes violently, like Normans invaded and conquered England.
Or like the rich and diverse American Indian history -- tribes came and went, sometimes replaced, pushed out, conquered or assimilated with previous peoples who lived there. Please define "right".
We didn't have the right, obviously, but it has happened and we need to deal with the current situation. And the Netherlands has offered them sovereignty multiple times in the last fifty years, they can leave anytime they want. But nowadays they want to stay in the kingdom, mostly because it offers them some security and stability.
The same business the US has in Guam or Puerto Rico, the UK in the Bahamas etc. It was a colony. They decided to become independent but still part of the kingdom of the Netherlands which was their choice. So the current status is such because the people of Curacao have decided they wanted it this way.
Not sure I’d call crossing traffic “within a few miles” a near-miss. Even at full cruising speed of 500-600MPH (less because the JetBlue was still on a climb) the civilian aircraft would cover a mile in 6-7 seconds, so we are talking 18 to 24 seconds to close 3-4 miles.
Also, it a common for military aircraft to not have a transponder on, especially in the vicinity of threats. Without a transponder the civilian aircraft TCAS/ACAS would not warn about traffic.
Not sure how far off the coast of Venezuela this occurred, but there are some very real SAM threats the Air Force aircraft would need to worry about.
Large aircraft take a while to avoid collisions due to their size and both jets are in motion. So this could have been within 5-10 seconds of a collision depending on specifics. The critical issue is the civilian aircraft “took evasive action on Friday to avoid a mid-air collision with a U.S. Air Force tanker plane near Venezuela, a pilot said in an air traffic control recording.”
Which needs to be reported as it then can impact other air traffic to avoid further issues.
Even if the military plane had its transponder off, the civilian plane didn't. The military pilot had no justification for not knowing the civilian plane was there and at a minimum adjusting its altitude to make this a non issue.
> Not sure I’d call crossing traffic “within a few miles” a near-miss. Even at full cruising speed of 500-600MPH (less because the JetBlue was still on a climb) the civilian aircraft would cover a mile in 6-7 seconds, so we are talking 18 to 24 seconds to close 3-4 miles.
Sweet, so they've got less than half a minute to avoid a collision.
> Not sure how far off the coast of Venezuela this occurred
64km off the coast of Venezuela.
> Also, it a common for military aircraft to not have a transponder on
Is it actually common for military aircrafts with transponders off to mix and match with public traffic in activate flight regions? One would think if there is threats somewhere, they'd first mark the region as restricted, so no public airplanes go there in the first place, then they can fly without the transponders.
> Is it actually common for military aircrafts with transponders off to mix and match with public traffic in activate flight regions?
As a pilot, I can tell you it happens all the time. Even in US domestic airspace. Transponder use is optional for the military, and they will turn them off for some training missions. (Or in this case, a real mission.)
No, they don't close the airspace when this is being done.
The pilots of both aircraft (civilian and military) are supposed to be keeping a constant visual watch for traffic. The military aircraft should also be keeping an eye on primary radar.
(Transponder use is also optional for some civilian aircraft, btw.)
> The pilots of both aircraft are supposed to be keeping a constant visual watch for traffic.
How's that supposed to work with Instrument Flight Rules, for which you literally train by wearing glasses which block your view outside the window [0]? And how are you supposed to spot an airplane coming at you with a closing speed of 1000 mph (1600 kmh)? It'll go from impossible-to-see to collision in a few seconds - which is why you won't see any "they didn't look outside the window enough" in the report of accidents like Gol Transportes Aéreos Flight 1907.
The whole point of Air Traffic Control is to control air traffic. Sure, there's plenty of uncontrolled airspace where you do indeed have to look out for traffic, but it's uncontrolled precisely because it rarely if ever sees commercial traffic.
> The pilots of both aircraft (civilian and military) are supposed to be keeping a constant visual watch for traffic. The military aircraft should also be keeping an eye on primary radar.
So in your opinion, that was went wrong here, the military/pilot of the refueling plane didn't actually keep visual watch for traffic nor radar?
I've been buzzed by a flight of military helicopters in the New Mexico desert. Not intentionally, they just happened to overfly my tent, and I just happened to have cell service somehow. I checked ADSB and sure enough they were flying dark.
Not necessarily; the same remoteness that made cell signal sparse likely makes ADS-B ground stations unlikely. There has to be one in range for it to show up places like FlightAware. Plenty of dead spots; you can help expand the network! https://www.flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/build/
I have an ADS-B receiver on a computer here, and am overhead a number of flight paths for JBLM.
The above comment is accurate, plenty of local training helicopter flights will be fully or partly dark (lights and/or transponders off), looking at my receiver's raw output stream.
ADSB is not mandatory in the US below FL100 or FL180 (10000/18000 feet), that covers most helicopter flights.
It depends also on the website you are using to track. I have an ADSB receiver that publishes to multiple tracking websites (the same data, unfiltered), and not all of them publish all the data. Flightradar24 doesn't show most of the military aircraft - I can see them on my local tracking interface but they are not shown on their website.
If the positioning [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUcs1LCjhcs) is at all close to accurate, that looks closer to 300km, with the entirety of Aruba between them & the closest point in Venezuela. (Or all of Curaçao, but I think that line is longer.)
(TFA does say 64 km, though.)
Edit: I'm not sure about 64 km. The 64km is for the Curaçao departing flight, but Curaçao's airport is itself 80 km from Venezuela, and they headed north pretty immediately? I.e., … they would have never been < 80 km…?
> Edit: I'm not sure about 64 km. The 64km is for the Curaçao departing flight, but Curaçao's airport is itself 80 km from Venezuela, and they headed north pretty immediately? I.e., … they would have never been < 80 km…?
If you take off from Curaçao and head like 10km west before you've actually left the island, you end up pretty much within 64km of Adicora, Venezuela. Probably what they meant I guess.
> Not sure I’d call crossing traffic “within a few miles” a near-miss.
Generally, from what I can find, the FAA definition is <500ft, so no, a few miles is potentially an issue, but not what would generally be categorized as a near miss unless there is some situational wrinkle that applies here.
The Air Force is probably used to flying much closer to one another, but civilians are not. Even in a busy airspace, jet airliners are usually kept apart >1000ft vertically, and much more horizontally in the direction they're moving. These birds can fly 500ft in less than 1 second after all.
> there are some very real SAM threats the Air Force aircraft would need to worry about
The US Air Force should /absolutely/ be worried about Venezuela fighting back, with SAMs or otherwise. This military action and potential war is a travesty and the whole world should condemn and ostracize the USA immediately.
ATC audio: https://youtu.be/Hto6aTt-X7A?si=2J-NnaXIcOnnWIqS
2) Why aren't the military craft listening to the local flight channel? Aren't you supposed to monitor local traffic? Especially when flying without a transponder? It's not like you can't listen to multiple channels at the same time!
Even for training they set up restricted/military areas in airspace all the time. Not doing it here, in allied (Curacao is part of the kingdom of the Netherlands) airspace is unacceptable. They could have coordinated this in the normal ways so ATC would route civilian traffic around the military operations or talk to the military controllers (who can see both types of traffic) before sending an aircraft through the shared airspace.
This isn't new, it's how military operations are done all the time.
With effectively no military and the Dutch government being an American lapdog, I doubt the people in charge need to care. They're already out there with orders to commit war crimes, shooting down an airliner or two that gets too close to their military aircraft wouldn't make much of a difference in the long run.
> shooting down an airliner or two that gets too close to their military aircraft wouldn't make much of a difference in the long run.
Would surely break its back?
So what's the plan? Just expect everyone to get out of their way?
It's been a problem specifically with US military aircraft for years that they just wander into other people's airspace with transponders off and expect to have it all to themselves.
We should just start shooting down anything big enough to need a transponder that is not using one. Doesn't matter who's in it, doesn't matter what it's for.
Maximum destructive, irreversible response.
Even if you think this is sometimes warranted, have you thought of the edge cases? You seem perfectly happy to be shot down yourself, sitting in your airplane with a failed transponder.
What's gotten into you to want to kill people so much?
Since this plane is military, it was obviously a plot coerced by Trump personally to destroy the sovereignty of everyone else, and he must be taught a lesson by shooting down his little toy planes.
There's alot of TDS going around, and it's hard to break it, especially if it didn't break already.
If anything, it seems to be you who is suffering from an affliction not unlike the one you wanted to recognize in somebody else.
The whole "oh yes, our military is active, but we aren't at war, and yes, the president tweeted about that" spiel is just untenable and ridiculous.
That is why this administration is leaning heavily into calling the drug traffickers "narco-terrorists" and calling fentanyl their "weapon of mass destruction". They're covering their ass legally so they can invade another country without congressional approval.
"Police Action" came the terse reply. "We don't talk about that one."
Course by then I'd already signed on the dotted, so...
Over 77 million people voted against Trump.
About 73 million were not old enough to vote.
With the exception of people who have religious beliefs prohibiting voting, it’s saying that you don’t feel strongly enough about the differences between the two candidates to pick one. There are some people who can plead various hardships, but most people don’t have that excuse: it really did come down to thinking their life would be fine either way.
It's really not saying that. If you ask me a loaded question, and I don't answer, that's really not saying explicitly what you want to hear.
I'm not saying the rest of the world is in the clear though. I think many countries are headed in a similar direction. Hopefully this is the wakeup call we all need to step up and arrest this slide into authoritarianism that's happening everywhere.
Also are they in favor to replacing this dictator with another pro-Trump one?
Current US president have a weak spot for every dictator and authoritarian leader in the world: El Salvador, Russia, Hungary, etc.
Might be not the best candidate to deal with dictators...
When your options are being poor, starved to death or dissapeared during the last 25 years, you take any chance for a change
Maybe we could write on a legal pad and hold it up in the rear window as we pass them on the highway.
Not always about the right issues, but at least they have the spirit
Thanks
Did you even read the comment thread before responding to GP? You're just spreading misinformation.
I read about this incident in detail even before it was posted on HN.
Maybe you should reflect on why people who have lead others in combat have decided that there should be rules to war before you declare that rules of war are a bad idea.
And why would a tanker plane come close to and even enter the hostile airspace?! may be one has to check Hegseth's Signal to get an answer for that, probably it is something like "big plane -> Scary!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mUbmJ1-sNs.
GPS Lat & Long Barometric Altitude Ground speed & track angle Rate of climb/descent
All updated every second or so.
If our aircaft were flying transponders-on during all these exercises then suddenly went dark, it’d signal imminent attack. This keeps them guessing. Possibly we’re even playing around with having them on some of the time for some aircraft, and off at other times.
We don’t do that with AWACS and such near Russia because we’re not posturing that we may attack them any day now, and want to avoid both accidental and “accidental” encounters with Russian weapons by making them very visible. In this case, an accidental engagement by Venezuelan forces probably isn’t something US leadership would be sad about.
Is that increase in precision much larger than the plane itself? If it's not then it couldn't possibly matter in this application.
Further radar is not a static image. The radar is constantly sweeping the sky, taking multiple measurements, and in some cases using filtering to avoid noise and jitter.
> GPS Lat & Long Barometric Altitude Ground speed & track angle Rate of climb/descent
You get or synthesize every one of those with radar as well.
Military radar is a different beast, but even then you're still trying to figure out what the returns mean. ADS-B explicitly says hey there are two aircraft in a tiny space. Civilian radar is likely not precise enough to identify two aircraft that close.
Although ADS-B is self reported and "vulnerable" to bad/spoofed info.
My CFI and I once saw ADS-B data from one of the startups near Palo Alto airport in California reporting supersonic speeds... at ground level, no less.
Edit: still have it in my email, heh. It was a Kitty Hawk Cora, N306XZ, reporting 933kts at 50'.
Watching Ukraine videos there is new game in town though - relatively cheap IR cameras. Using IR, day or night, you can detect a jet plane from very large distances and just guide missile to the plane computer-game-joystick style.
You answered your own question here.
Military planes doing military things always fly with their transponder off. It would be suicide not to.
Example: https://flightaware.com/live/flight/FORTE10/history/20230821...
US AWACS has the capability to identify civilian aircraft and route military traffic well clear of civil traffic.
I know I will get a downvote from this reply
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/us_restrictions...
[1] https://safeairspace.net/
I really wonder how long it will take to rebuild all these burned bridges.
"The occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects FOR FUTURE COLONIZATION by any European powers." (emphasis mine)
https://usinfo.org/PUBS/LivingDoc_e/monroe.htm
Mostly France and the Netherlands.
I just don't see how we're going back.
at this point, there are unfortunately no "good guys" at the state level.
They simply should stay the fuck away from that airspace then. And by that I don't mean JetBlue.
I understand that this might be disruptive to people who want to drop explosives on other people, and while this disruption is a fantastic benefit, it's only a side-effect.
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-F...
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/july-3/u-s-warsh...
Mistakes aren't good, but pretending that you didn't make them adds insult to injury.
It's sort of funny that this thread turned into a USA vs Russia debate when they both play the same games. One of them is just slightly better at pretending like they're playing fair and friendly. My take-away from that is once an organized body, be it a country, corporation or religion, gets very large and holds a lot of power, they will inevitably start doing bad things.
Doesn't sound to me like owning your mistake.
Isn't the famous quote:
'I'll never apologize for the United States of America, I don't care what the facts are'.
in the context of that after all?
I don't know about accidental, but if anyone thinks Russia is not ballsy about butchering civilians, they need a refresher on Russia's wars during the last few decades. Last few years would be enough too. It's a principle of their military affairs.
It's the first time I hear someone calls Curaçao a "nation". It's just the normal Dutch island, not even some special status territory. Yes, it's in Carribean, but why do they omit "Dutch" and call it a "Carribean nation"?
That said, I don't think it's accurate to paint Curaçao as just another normal Dutch island the same as any other. It's really a constituent country that's part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, just not a sovereign state or a nation.
It is a 19th century term that rarely applies these days, but still sees some residual usage.
Most people would consider the Netherlands a "country", but now we have a country within that country. Israel is a state, Japan is a state, but there are 50 states in the United States. "[People's] Republic of XYZ" generally refers to a sovereign state, but Russia has republics inside. You can't just call something what the locals call it and expect that your readers will get the picture. Even worse, people are often deeply divided as to what a given territory should be called.
So I will generally forgive journalists for picking a neutral-sounding, ambiguous expression in cases like this. What matters here is that the Dutch control this airspace, regardless of Curaçao's status within their kingdom.
They're still in the kingdom which means they're not completely on their own but nation is a good word.
What "right" are you talking about, is there an agency where we file a claim, and it issues us "rights"?
All people from all nations, tribes and states came from somewhere, sometimes even replacing the local population. Sometimes peacefully, like Anglo-Saxons pushed out local Britons in England, sometimes violently, like Normans invaded and conquered England.
Or like the rich and diverse American Indian history -- tribes came and went, sometimes replaced, pushed out, conquered or assimilated with previous peoples who lived there. Please define "right".
Also, it a common for military aircraft to not have a transponder on, especially in the vicinity of threats. Without a transponder the civilian aircraft TCAS/ACAS would not warn about traffic.
Not sure how far off the coast of Venezuela this occurred, but there are some very real SAM threats the Air Force aircraft would need to worry about.
(edited typos)
Which needs to be reported as it then can impact other air traffic to avoid further issues.
Sweet, so they've got less than half a minute to avoid a collision.
64km off the coast of Venezuela.
> Also, it a common for military aircraft to not have a transponder on
Is it actually common for military aircrafts with transponders off to mix and match with public traffic in activate flight regions? One would think if there is threats somewhere, they'd first mark the region as restricted, so no public airplanes go there in the first place, then they can fly without the transponders.
As a pilot, I can tell you it happens all the time. Even in US domestic airspace. Transponder use is optional for the military, and they will turn them off for some training missions. (Or in this case, a real mission.)
No, they don't close the airspace when this is being done.
The pilots of both aircraft (civilian and military) are supposed to be keeping a constant visual watch for traffic. The military aircraft should also be keeping an eye on primary radar.
(Transponder use is also optional for some civilian aircraft, btw.)
How's that supposed to work with Instrument Flight Rules, for which you literally train by wearing glasses which block your view outside the window [0]? And how are you supposed to spot an airplane coming at you with a closing speed of 1000 mph (1600 kmh)? It'll go from impossible-to-see to collision in a few seconds - which is why you won't see any "they didn't look outside the window enough" in the report of accidents like Gol Transportes Aéreos Flight 1907.
The whole point of Air Traffic Control is to control air traffic. Sure, there's plenty of uncontrolled airspace where you do indeed have to look out for traffic, but it's uncontrolled precisely because it rarely if ever sees commercial traffic.
[0]: https://www.sportys.com/jeppshades-ifr-training-glasses.html
So in your opinion, that was went wrong here, the military/pilot of the refueling plane didn't actually keep visual watch for traffic nor radar?
The above comment is accurate, plenty of local training helicopter flights will be fully or partly dark (lights and/or transponders off), looking at my receiver's raw output stream.
It depends also on the website you are using to track. I have an ADSB receiver that publishes to multiple tracking websites (the same data, unfiltered), and not all of them publish all the data. Flightradar24 doesn't show most of the military aircraft - I can see them on my local tracking interface but they are not shown on their website.
(TFA does say 64 km, though.)
Edit: I'm not sure about 64 km. The 64km is for the Curaçao departing flight, but Curaçao's airport is itself 80 km from Venezuela, and they headed north pretty immediately? I.e., … they would have never been < 80 km…?
If you take off from Curaçao and head like 10km west before you've actually left the island, you end up pretty much within 64km of Adicora, Venezuela. Probably what they meant I guess.
Generally, from what I can find, the FAA definition is <500ft, so no, a few miles is potentially an issue, but not what would generally be categorized as a near miss unless there is some situational wrinkle that applies here.
Is there a NOTAM for military traffic on this area?
The US Air Force should /absolutely/ be worried about Venezuela fighting back, with SAMs or otherwise. This military action and potential war is a travesty and the whole world should condemn and ostracize the USA immediately.