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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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…?
> 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.
After the near miss from JetBlue, there was another near miss with a business jet yesterday morning: https://nos.nl/l/2594640
ATC audio: https://youtu.be/Hto6aTt-X7A?si=2J-NnaXIcOnnWIqS
& the ATC audio on the same channel, but for the flight in TFA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUcs1LCjhcs
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.
Because it’s flying near Venezuela, who we’re currently fucking with militarily.
Can’t you do it safely, with transponder on? It’s not like it will get softer or anything.
we wouldn’t be doing that, we voted for President that will end all the wars, not start new ones
it's only war if it's from the Middle East region of the world, otherwise it's just sparkling law enforcement
Thank you for buying my bridge, no refunds asked and zero money back down
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".
And by “suspicious of” you mean “bigoted against”.
but also: exploit the oil
Nicolas, Uday, and Qusay Maduro have 48 hours to leave Venezuela. Until then, we have not launched a special military operation.
Yes. The tanker plane with its turned off transponder off the coast is totally not a military operation.
Just a flesh wound.
If you thought you were, you were tricked.
I think your sarcasm detector needs calibrating.
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.
You guys get what you voted for, time to take some responsibility.
Venezuelans also don't want you to send Americans.
I don't think anyone in the world besides the deranged fanbase wants to see this.
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.
I’m sorry, which hostile nation?
The United States.
What day is it?
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.
The information broadcast by transponder is significantly more precise than what you will get with radar, microphone array, or binoculars.
GPS Lat & Long Barometric Altitude Ground speed & track angle Rate of climb/descent
All updated every second or so.
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.
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.
> a national security operation
You answered your own question here.
Military planes doing military things always fly with their transponder off. It would be suicide not to.
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.
Example: https://flightaware.com/live/flight/FORTE10/history/20230821...
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 US could issue a notice of an Alert Area where military operations are in progress AND could coordinate with Dutch airspace authorities.
US AWACS has the capability to identify civilian aircraft and route military traffic well clear of civil traffic.
They could also not invade a country that did nothing to attack them, but I guess that’s asking too much.
Venezuela invaded the US by not selling the US oil at US terms
It is the US, what do you expect from them?
I know I will get a downvote from this reply
Everyone expects war from americans but at this point I wouldn't be surprised if Trump chickened out.
I downvoted you. Sorry, that's just my SOP when I read this things like "I know I will get a downvote"
We can arrest Maduro for drug trafficking and then pardon him later for being set up by Biden.
Slap him with sanctions for human rights violations then drop them and invite him to the white house.
Notice was put out NOV
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/us_restrictions...
A sizable chunk of the world is currently considered hazardous for commercial aviation.[1] Ops.group maintains a quick reference map. It's bad.
[1] https://safeairspace.net/
Being allies really doesn't mean anything anymore, does it?
I really wonder how long it will take to rebuild all these burned bridges.
What does allies have to do with this situation? Both aircraft involved were American.
Happened in Dutch Caribbean controlled Airspace
So the same people he threatened to take greenland from?
TIL Europe still has some presence in the Americas. Thought all of that was gone with the Monroe Doctrine
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)
https://usinfo.org/PUBS/LivingDoc_e/monroe.htm
France's longest land border is the one it shares with Brazil.
You may find this interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_territories_of_members...
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.
Mostly France and the Netherlands.
meh, bridges get constantly burned and rebuilt between allies and enemies both - just another day really
You run into trouble if someone manages to set all of them on fire at once.
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.
Nothing beats a JetBlue holiday
So never fly in or out of DCA, and avoid anywhere near Venezuela.
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.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46269601
> Caribbean nation of Curacao
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.
I'm a state actor because I always remember my lines when I go up on stage.
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).
Lots of small islands have similar status, for example The Cayman Islands, Bermuda & Puerto Rico.
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.
It's not part of the country the Netherlands anymore. They voted to leave.
They're still in the kingdom which means they're not completely on their own but nation is a good word.
Curacao has been a country that is part of the kingdom of the Netherlands since 2010.
the bigger question is: what business does the Netherlands have all the way across the ocean in an island? Who gave them the "right" to own it?
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".
You could pick up a history textbook and find out.
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.
technically, it's a country within the Kingdom :)
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.
(edited typos)
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.
And the tanker was likely supervised from an AWACS aircraft that probably should’ve flagged this, too.
> 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.
[0]: https://www.sportys.com/jeppshades-ifr-training-glasses.html
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.
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…?
Threats are not to civilian aircraft. If conflict occurs areas would become restricted.
> 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.
Well common enroute separation is 5NM so in aviation, it's close.
Is there a NOTAM for military traffic on this area?
The FAA did warn about military ops in the area. Good question; not sure they issued a NOTAM.
> 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.