‘Unprecedented’: 13 aircraft mysteriously disappear from radars in heart of Europe

a reply to: SurrenderingAmerica
This is the first I've heard of this, thanks for the post!
S & F

I'm going with the A L I E N S excuse!

originally posted by: masqua
My immediate thought on this: Would it affect incoming missile defences as well?

Nothing would be better for 'first strike capabilities' than if those missiles effectively disappeared from radar.

You read my mind. I was wondering this as well.. even other than missiles.. just airborne payload ( ahem, planes..) . 25 minutes is an incredibly long time for being effectively blind to whatever is targeted by whatever this is.

On the other hand, my BIL is retired from NASA.. electrical engineer. He doodles with doo dads as a hobby... and Im not talking potato clocks and amazing crystal radio kits. There are a LOT of doodlers out there... some with less harmless intentions and some support. Hell, one of the KIDS in my neighborhood was fooling with a radar jammer he made and got in trouble. He was wanting to jam the speed traps radar they set up along side our neighborhood on a main road. LOL!

I dont KNOW anything, but if this is not a glitch or flare or whatever.. if its something tested... this is very frightening. My bad brain can think of a dozen rotten ways to use this against an enemy.

I get the impression this deals with the transponder signals. It is known that spoofing the ADS-B system is possible. But that is believed to be more along the lines of adding fake aircraft signals.

a reply to: WeSbO

Maybe some gouverment entity or something, was testing something to try and shed light on what happended to MH370, coz they have no idea what happened to that flight and are trying to understand how it went off radar.

They wouldn't put all these people at risk to test such.

originally posted by: Staroth
a reply to: WeSbO

Maybe some gouverment entity or something, was testing something to try and shed light on what happended to MH370, coz they have no idea what happened to that flight and are trying to understand how it went off radar.

They wouldn't put all these people at risk to test such.

Yeah, theyd NEVER inject folks to test things... or test bombs on folks and put people at risk either.

if it's only 13 airplanes - can someone get a list of which ones?

maybe check the make/model etc. or passenger list, or cargo manifest - this might pull up something to correlate them together, or rule out some things.

a reply to: Staroth

They may not have intended on making the planes blackout for 25 minutes, and may have being trying to block one plane and not 13... Tests don't always go as planned.

It would be interesting to try and find a common denominator for all the 13 planes, but I guess we don't have any info on the 13 planes.

It's sound a bit like the current season of 24, except that in the series it's drones.

a reply to: SurrenderingAmerica

This is called covering your tracks.

I'm still operating under the assumption that the Malaysian plane was stolen via remote control. They have to make "planes disappearing" look like a glitch that doesn't only affect the stolen airplane. This is more hacks to make it look like a system-wide failure rather than putting focus solely on this stolen airplane. It's quite possible they are using some fear tactics too.

a reply to: SurrenderingAmerica

Each time for 25mins

Twice same amount of time..rules out natural causes I would think.

a reply to: SurrenderingAmerica

I wonder if this is a new military weapon being tested out that can blacken radars completely.

You have to figure, if other countries cant develop dependable stealth like the US, the next best thing is to just making a weapon that would make the goodyear blimp disappear on radar by killing all radar capabilities.

Thats what I think anyways. Russia has probably given up on stealth until a crash can be examined properly or when China steals an aircraft it "accidentally" downs.

In the mean time, they can make ALL their aircraft just disappear.Them or China. I would think China is even less capable of developing stealth than Russia. They would want this weapon more than others. It would be an adequate response to US capabilities.

a reply to: tadaman

What makes you think that stealth is only passive? How much more effective would it be with a bleeding edge EW system attached to it that could do something like this.

a reply to: Zaphod58

well because you would then have to develop and equip new weapon systems that could possibly go dud and be captured, essentially giving your enemy an ability to see in the dark you create.

OR rely heavily on laser guided weapons. From what I understand atmospheric conditions make that a changing variable of effectiveness.

This is a guess of course. I wouldn't know.

a reply to: tadaman

Stealth doesn't make your platform invisible, just really hard to see. If you add an electronic warfare kit to it, that can spoof just about any radar out there, without anyone even knowing it's happening, unlike with brute force jamming, then not only is your platform orders of magnitude more effective, your Day One survival rate goes way up. You could be looking at platforms that have a 90+% survival rate in the early days of a war. Other platforms would be lucky to be at 75%.

Well, who needs Stealth planes when you can simply block radar so no one can see you...

Is something like this in test phase?

Who'd be doing this? Russia just flew 2 bombers close to the U.S -- another phase of testing?

The disappearance of objects on radar screens was connected with a planned military exercise which took place in various parts of Europe on June 5 and 10 and whose goal was the interruption of radiocommunication frequencies," the Slovak state Air Traffic Services company said in a statement.

He said that 10 planes transiting Austrian airspace were affected in the first incident and three in the second, and that he had heard that 50 aircraft were affected across Europe.

Richard Klima, spokesman for the Czech Air Navigation Service, said: "We saw random outages of aircraft detection within the system of the so-called secondary radar lasting several tens of seconds and up to several minutes. But thanks to the complete coverage of air space also through classic primary radars, we constantly had information about the positioning of airplanes and operational safety was not threatened."

A spokesman for Austria's Defence Ministry said it was investigating the incidents but could not immediately confirm how many planes were involved.

The spokesman said military radar - which actively track plane movements, unlike the passive radar used by civilian air-traffic control - had continued to work at all times.

Reuters

Mankind's attempt to kill each other is alive and well. What's a little collateral damage, right?

a reply to: McGinty

Because it only works on secondary radar. Fire control radar will still see you.

a reply to: roadgravel

Because TCAS still worked. Which means they still had avoidance software on the planes.

originally posted by: Zaphod58
a reply to: roadgravel

Because TCAS still worked. Which means they still had avoidance software on the planes.

Youre a veritable expert on this subject SO let me ask... would that mean that an operator would have to be on the plane?

a reply to: Advantage

No, avoidance systems are completely automatic. They're tied into the transponder.

originally posted by: Zaphod58
a reply to: Advantage

No, avoidance systems are completely automatic. They're tied into the transponder.

OHH I see now.. lightbulb. Well that even makes it more interesting.

Considering who makes the parts and imbeds malware in hardware.... China.

For those of us (me) who need to understand transponders before really understanding this.
www.avweb.com...