HeyEng

Some new insights into the Langley and other military base drone swarms from 60 Minutes.

Yea the barrel sections for the 707,727, and 737 have a very slight figure eight cross section like the old Stratocruiser but very subtle from a casual glance. You have to dig into the maintenance manual diagrams for the FS, WL, and BL to really see it.

Several arrivals into DCA reported false TA/RA notifications.

The British Army has more horses (for all the ceremonial duties) than tanks!

Yea unfortunately the warhead fragments managed to pierce all three hydraulic systems but otherwise the airframe managed to absorb the damage pretty good.

Great video by Juan Brown of the Blancolireo channel of the shoot down of the E190. There was quite a lot of confusion prior to the incident with the Russian ATC controllers not understanding that the GPS jamming wasn’t allowing the crew to accept RNP and RNAV approaches.

I came from the AF AMC community so VHF is our goto radios since we operate in ICAO airspace around the world. I do not think we are going to find any single fix for this accident but hopefully some changes come about.

From what I have heard they were on UHF and ATC were dual transmitting on UHF/VHF so you can hear ATC talking to the -60 but any civilian traffic could not hear the -60. Also I still have not heard if this was an older -60 with legacy avionics or a more modern one with glass. If it was legacy it probably had the small “fish finder” type of TCAS whereas glass typically overlays the TCAS on the HSI display. TCAS is probably moot anyhow since the TA/RA is disabled below 1000’

Yet another concern related to the LEAP engines is the LRD (Load Reduction Device) which can dump sump oil from the fan section and into the compressor section resulting in smoke in the cockpit from the AC packs. This video explains it much better than I can and it’s not an insurmountable problem as long as you know about before hand but apparently was poorly explained in the manuals given to flight crews!

I hope that one outcome of this accident is that we start installing more VHF radios in military aviation. I don’t expect every helicopter or fighter to have a VHF radio but certainly this helicopter flying and training in a dense civilian airspace environment should be a priority!

I have not been at McGuire (Sorry McGuire-Fort Dix Joint Unified Base) since I retired so I was wondering if the “Cornfield Cruiser” is still in use outside of Morgantown. It’s some sort of Naval Ship Superstructure used to test radars and would be a logical “target” for drones although testing over large civilian populated areas seams suspect especially when there are more suitable MOA to choose from (most of Nevada is basically a test range).

As to that last paragraph, boy was I wrong! What a difference a year makes!

Thanks!

Could my post on “WB-57F and Drone Swarms” over on the General Discussion be move over or combined as well? There’s three pages so maybe just the last few threads.

Judging by the size and scope of the Drone swarm story over New Jersey maybe this needs its own thread. I saw a report from a local broadcaster who was sort of a sceptic and thought most of the sightings was hysteria (some sightings are definitely conventional aircraft) or misidentification and was doing a report on the New Jersey State Police deploying drones of their own and attempting to track them when drones started appearing while broadcasting. The NJSP drones were quite large and sophisticated in themselves but the Police said they had no luck tracking them due to the speed and lack of any infrared signature of the suspect drones!