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A comment on Missteps Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practice Led to a Fatal Crash. Parent comment

Re:Missteps Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practi... by gwbas1c on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @05:43PM (#43838380)
> Doing so was Army protocol, meant to allow the pilots to practice secretly whisking away a senior government official in an emergency.

1: You don't want to do that for the first time in wartime.

2: In case you've been living under a rock, we are at war with Russia right now. We just haven't declared war.

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Re:Missteps Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practi... by lm28469 on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @05:57PM (#43838492)
I fail to see how flying untracked in a public airspace 8000km away from Moscow has anything to do with the US being in a new cold war, I don't see what good it brings, especially if it's to play hide and seek around a civilian airport
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Re:Missteps Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practi... by Hnrobert42 on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @06:36PM (#43838858)
The Russian Embassy is pretty close as is the Chinese. That said, they could easily track military helicopters with or without ADS-B Out.
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Re:Missteps Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practi... by firesteelrain on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @07:03PM (#43839100)
Easily? I suppose a surveillance radar on the roof of those embassies wouldn’t go unnoticed.
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Re:Missteps Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practi... by jamessinghal on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @08:39PM (#43839854)
American embassies do this worldwide, famously spying on Angela Merkel from the Berlin Embassy (probably). [1]

[1] https://www.duncancampbell.org/content/embassy-spy-centre-ne...

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Re:Missteps Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practi... by lm28469 on Wednesday April 30, 2025 @03:25AM (#43842162)
And how exactly does it help Russia to know there are planes and helicopters flying in the US around an airport

What's the next conspiracy? They have anti air weapons in embassies and wait for a military helicopter transporting a high value target?

Either way it's not worth 64 lives...

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Re:Missteps Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practi... by pc86 on Wednesday April 30, 2025 @09:20AM (#43844848)
It should be pretty obvious to anyone who's spent more than about 45 seconds thinking about it that you can gather good information about a potential enemy by watching how they train. For military and intelligence operations you want layered security, and you don't want to make intelligence-gathering operations against you any easier than you need to. So it makes perfect sense at least up to the moment of this crash that if you're operating military training flights in an area with a lot of foreign assets that you'd disable a feature that literally broadcasts where you are with telemetry once per second.

This mindset isn't conspiracy and framing it as such makes you sound like you have no idea what you're talking about.

> They have anti air weapons in embassies?

It'd honestly be pretty surprising if they didn't, but this is also why when countries officially go to war with each other the embassies are typically evacuated and/or evicted.

> Either way it's not worth 64 lives

Not a single person here or elsewhere is claiming otherwise.

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Re:Missteps Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practi... by tonyarkles on Wednesday April 30, 2025 @01:23PM (#43848277)
> They have anti air weapons in embassies and wait for a military helicopter transporting a high value target?

I agree with you that it seems relatively unlikely that there would be a large weapons cache inside an embassy. I want you to consider the opposite scenario of what you're dismissing though.

If an American CIA officer in Russia wanted to shoot down a helicoper, do you think it would be that difficult for them to get ahold of a rocket launcher and do so?

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Re:Missteps Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practi... by ClumsyPilot on Wednesday April 30, 2025 @03:47PM (#43849826)
So what is the scenario, Russia does <what> to cause the president to be evacuated, and hopes he will fly through this route on a Blackhawk, as opposed to any other option, places an agent with a rocket launcher along the route, hopes it gets through countermeasures and shoots down the helicopter.

After this unlikely series of events, what is achieved? Do American people give up because someone killed an easily replaceable politician with bad approval rating?

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Re:Missteps Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practi... by chmod775 on Wednesday April 30, 2025 @10:47AM (#43846014)
You don't need radar to track aircraft with ADS-B on: The plane is actively broadcasting its position.

There's ADS-B receivers the size of a USB stick - because some are USB sticks and available for 50 bucks on Amazon.

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Re:Missteps Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practi... by firesteelrain on Wednesday April 30, 2025 @11:03AM (#43846282)
No, but if ADS-B is off then its not squawking unless its got like Mode-3 or Mode-S then maybe MLAT can be used.
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Re:Missteps Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practi... by jjwiseman on Wednesday April 30, 2025 @02:26PM (#43849016)
Just to be specific, PAT25 seems to have been using Mode C for an earlier portion of its flight and Mode S for the later portion.
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Re:Missteps Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practi... by tonyarkles on Wednesday April 30, 2025 @01:20PM (#43848228)
https://scdn.rohde-schwarz.com/ur/pws/dl_downloads/premiumdo...

Passive RADAR is an incredibly cool technology. Instead of the RADAR station transmitting its own signals, it relies on nearby high-power cultural transmissions (FM radio, broadcast TV, etc) as the signal source and measures the reflections of those signals off of aircraft. Since the majority of traffic in the region would be broadcasting ADSB, you'd be able to figure out which tracks from your Passive RADAR system correspond to aircraft without ADSB.

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Re:Missteps Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practi... by firesteelrain on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @05:51PM (#43838450)
True, train as you fight. But this was like a check-ride for the young Captain. ADS-B Out didn’t need to be off.
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Re:Missteps Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practi... by shadowgovt on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @07:22PM (#43839240)
If we haven't declared war we're not at War. Words mean things.

Especially in this era when this administration seems to be gearing up for military action in domestic spaces when Congress has declared no war.

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Re:Missteps Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practi... by cafard on Wednesday April 30, 2025 @07:21AM (#43843638)
For how many years was the United States engaged in a declared war, and for how many other years did its military engage in substantial operations?
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Re:Missteps Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practi... by shadowgovt on Wednesday April 30, 2025 @10:59AM (#43846234)
I'm not excusing the malfeasance of past administrations when highlighting the malfeasance of this administration.
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Re:Missteps Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practi... by actionfromafar on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @06:28PM (#43838784)
At war with Russia, or at war with Ukraine? It's hard to tell these days.
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Re:Missteps Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practi... by HaZeust on Wednesday April 30, 2025 @01:51PM (#43848619)
>"We just haven't declared war."

Then we're not at war. Hope this clears things up for you!

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Missteps Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practi... by calfuris on Wednesday April 30, 2025 @02:12PM (#43848876)
By this standard, the US has not been at war since WWII. This is an absurd result, so I conclude that the standard is wrong. Official declarations of war have become decoupled from actually being at war.
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