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Project Coldfeet

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122 pointsThevet29 comments

Some incredible 1989 video of the Fulton Recovery System/Skyhook at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkNiOjJvlS4&feature=youtu.be...

This station was on relatively thin drift ice. It seems that the soviets could have sunk it with some bombs or maybe an oil fire. Or drill a hole and drop in the sensitive equipment. Maybe they didn't think the secrets were worth the effort. I wonder how much of the mission was driven by a desire to deploy the skyhook.

If you're intrigued by this, William Leary's book "Project COLDFEET: Secret Mission to a Soviet Ice Station" is definitely worth a read.

I thought those balloons in Metal Gear Solid were completely made up!

I would swear I've seen a movie with this plot (not a recent one), but I don't see it mentioned on the Wikipedia page. Anyone know the movie name, or am I wrong?

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008) uses the surface to air system used in this operation as a plot device, I believe.

You may be thinking of Ice Station Zebra (1968). The Wikipedia page mentions Project COLDFEET as one of the inspirations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Station_Zebra

Yep, that's it. Thank you!

Wow. I read this book as a teenager.

The related wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-air_recovery... mentions use of the recovery system in Thunderball, The Green Berets, and The Dark Knight.

Personally this article turned out to be more interesting for me than the original post. I've seriously thought that it existed only as a movie effect and not in real life.

I read (and can't recall the source) that, when they tested this system, they first tried it on a pig. But the pig couldn't use arms and legs to stabilize itself, and so it spun while being winched into the plane. It entered the plane in a disoriented state. When it recovered (?) from that, it attacked the crew.

Good times... ;-)

From https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig... : Lifted off the ground, the pig began to spin as it flew through the air at 125 mph. It arrived on board undamaged but in a disoriented state. Once it recovered, it attacked the crew.

Yes, that was it.

Did this system for surface-to-air recovery more or less get its lunch eaten by helicopters?

Still, pretty neat.

970km one way is very long for a helicopter. That's the reason they didn't use one in this case. I'm not sure if there are any helicopters to this day that will do 2000km without refueling.

Helicopters these days can at least get one way, so the simplest solution today would probably be dropping return fuel from a cargo plane or doing in-flight refueling of a helicopter.

Out of curiosity, wouldn't refueling the helicopter in-flight require another helicopter (with the same range problem)?

I don't know if this was done, but it's totally possible to get a helicopter to carry a tank of fuel and leave it floating midway in the ocean (or on ice strong enough to land on).

You can then go back, refuel, and this time go the whole way, stopping off for fuel at your new midway point.

You just need to make sure you don't forget where you put the fuel!

Mid-air refueling a helicopter does not require another helicopter. It could be a KC-130.

If you have enough equipment, you can set up a relay where tankers themselves get refueled by other tankers. This can dramatically extend the range of a small number of aircraft, though the logistics (and expense) gets out of hand quickly.

The British did this during the Falklands War in 1982. In Operation Black Buck, a bomber from Ascension Island (near the equator), attacked Port Stanley Airport (~52°S, about 12000 km away). To do so, the bomber was refueled 7 times on the way out (and once on the return), while a fleet of tankers refueled each other 9 more times. Wikipedia has a diagram showing how this worked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Black_Buck#/media/Fi...

Is that equivalent to the 'rocket equation', where each tanker is analogous to another stage on the rocket? (You spend increasing amounts of fuel to get the fuel out to where it needs to be transferred in to be then burned.)

Seems very similar to me, though the constraints are a bit different: you want the tankers back, presumably, but you also don't have to move all of it together

No.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/Pave_Haw...

Wow, that looks terrifying with the rotor so close to the plane!

A tilt-rotor aircraft like the V-22 Osprey would have the necessary range unlike a standard helicopter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Boeing_V-22_Osprey

The V-22 entered service 45 years after this happened though, which made its use....challenging.

Made me think of Hunt for Red October. Helicopter range is a (minor) plot device there.

So they literally stole equipment?

That's not cause for war?

If it was, the US would have declared war on China a decade ago.

Non-violent theft is a common geopolitical strategy.

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