U-2 spy plane caused widespread shutdown of U.S. flights

Re:U-2 spy plane caused widespread shutdown of U.S. flights by sschueller on Sunday May 04, 2014 @11:54AM (#7694668)

Could it be that the U2 has sending an ADS-B signal with incorrect altitude to hide its actual location?

I would think that would be a feature of such a plane and it may have been activated by mistake.

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Re:U-2 spy plane caused widespread shutdown of U.S. flights by jjwiseman on Sunday May 04, 2014 @09:29PM (#7696583)

I captured ADS-B packets from a U-2 in the LAX area (using an RTL-SDR dongle) on 2013-06-18. If you want to see them for yourself, the decoded packets (hex) are at https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7443278/Mode%20S%20Captu... (along with other aircraft).

The U-2 I picked up is ICAO ae094b, registration 68-10336[1]. You can decode the packet information using dump1090[2]:

  ./dump1090 --net-only > out.txt

Then in another terminal:

  cat mode-s-capture-2013-06-18.raw | nc localhost 30001

Then in out.text, look for "ae094b". You'll see packets like

  *0206042b1365a5;
  CRC: ae094b (ok)
  DF 0: Short Air-Air Surveillance.
    VS             : Airborne
    CC             : 1
    SL             : 0
    Altitude       : 60000 feet
    ICAO Address   : ae094b

[1] http://www.airliners.net/search/photo.search?regsearch=68-10... [2] https://github.com/MalcolmRobb/dump1090

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Re:U-2 spy plane caused widespread shutdown of U.S. flights by ceejayoz on Sunday May 04, 2014 @01:49PM (#7695067)

U2s aren't particularly stealthy and if you want to hide the location you just turn the transponder off.

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