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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

It's a huge mystery how an airline pilot could possibly see a cruise missile shaped object right outside of the White Sands Missile Range. Probably aliens.

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There is absolutely zero chance a cruise missile would be fired without closing the airspace to civilian aircraft.

The pilot was at 37,000 feet and said the object was above them. Commercial planes top out at about 42k feet and would have shown up on ADS-B. A U-2 flying at 60k would look like a long cylindrical object about the size of a cruise missile (in the same way a 747 looks small from the ground), and not show up on instrurments. Oh and they regularly fly out of Nevada to swoop down over New Mexico/Texas on their way to Mexico and Central America.

Tell that to the people on the plane that was shot down above Ukrainian airspace.

shh, those were aliens too, at least according to Russia.

Wait, wait, wait...you're saying that because a missile has shot down a plane before in another country during a conflict, the United States military is firing cruise missiles without clearing civilian airspace?

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down with a surface-to-air missile, a weapon intended specifically for targeting aircraft. A "cruise missile" by comparison is intended for terrestrial targets and has a minimum range of a few hundred miles. Should the missile come in contact with an aircraft during its initial launch phase, your warhead would basically come right back down on top of you - which is why they close the airspace.

I'm not sure how that's related? Ukraine was a warzone at the time.

And still is at the time :(, just nobody cares anymore

This is reference to this incident that happened during peacetime in 2001 - not later incident during the conflict.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia_Airlines_Flight_1812

this is a poor comparison

Cruise missiles are able to fly in controlled and uncontrolled airspace on Military Training Routes (MTR). There are procedures in place for a Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) to be requested and published that alerts other operators of the hazard to flight.

Speaking as a pilot, If there was a NOTAM I can guarantee with 100% certainty an airline pilot would know about it. Also the military doesn’t screw around with this sort of thing, I think the chance is virtually nil they intentionally flew an unmanned aircraft that close to an airliner.

The military screws around constantly. That's why Cavalese happened. That's why that Apache crashed showing off in Afghanistan. IR655 got blown up. Like, we have lots of "military screwing around" instances and like zero aliens. It's so hard to believe that it's aliens.

Just doesn't make sense in a Bayesian sense.

Also pilot here: I’d drop that figure to 90% as there are so many notams it’s easy to miss the needle in the haystack with the ridiculous volume of irrelevant notams out these days.

https://ops.group/blog/the-problem-of-bullshit-notams/

It's not military. It's private weapons development company. There's no payload, so they do not need to notify commercial airliners, and it's a classified project, so they cannot anyway.

They are testing hypersonic missile systems for both ABM and warhead delivery.

0 chance implies no one makes mistakes.

> There is absolutely zero chance a cruise missile would be fired without closing the airspace to civilian aircraft.

Sometimes the military misses a lot of items on the checklist, and accidentally ships a nuclear missile where it didn't intend [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_States_Air_Force_n...

I wouldn't say "absolutely zero chance", but I'd say "it's unlikely this was an expected outcome, and it's possible that someone is in deep trouble right now."

For others unfamiliar and reticent to google, a "U-2" is:

> The Lockheed U-2, nicknamed "Dragon Lady", is an American single-jet engine, high altitude reconnaissance aircraft operated by the United States Air Force and previously flown by the Central Intelligence Agency.

U-2s don't fly fast.

They do when they’re flying the opposite direction as you.

Also, he’ll if we civilians know what kinds of retrofits have been made in the past several decades, particularly for the purpose of testing and development.

The U2 is a very well-understood and photographed airframe. Even if given engine upgrades, it wouldn't be more than a few mph faster than before. Those big glider wings limit it to a very narrow, predictable, flight envelope.

A320 and U-2 go the same speed. Also the U-2 has big wings and a big radar signature. Basically this makes no sense.

They go the same speed, but the U-2 is at twice the altitude.

Due to retinal persistence you will see the part of an aircraft that is longest in the direction of travel (the body) more clearly than the wings. Only military aircraft carry radar, commercial planes depend on TCAS which requires the other object to be transmitting a beacon signal.

On the contrary, the USA has accidently dropped nuclear missiles from planes, and have experience all kinds of other incompetence over the decades.

https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Ill...

There are quite a few more safeguards in place now to prevent accidentally letting a missile reach over 30k feet above US soil.

If a private weapons contractor was testing a new hypersonic missile without any warhead on it, under a classified program - it seems to me that they would need to fly it outside restricted space to test long distances range and guidance systems.

As long as they were not at commercially used altitudes, it seems to me that they wouldn't advise anyone.

It was over 300 of miles from the white sands missile range. The plane had just flown over the western edge of Oklahoma, in the far northeast corner of new Mexico. It was closer to the air force academy in Colorado Springs than it was to white sands.

Either there's military activity that the military doesn't want to talk about, or extraterrestrials consider green chile a delicacy that is otherwise unobtainable in the universe. Both seem equally plausible.

I'm not completely up to speed on modern cruise missiles, but don't they leave a smoke trail/contrail/etc behind them if they have a conventional propulsion system? Or do they burn fairly clean in flight?

Aside from launch where they typically have some kind of boost stage, cruise missiles fly at low altitudes with small turbofan engines. Not much of a visual exhaust signature:

https://youtu.be/BGoJl8Lr46g

https://youtu.be/WyeMyhKE5Yw

Ah fair enough. Thats some impressive footage by the way!

You think the range officer just let this one get away? They shut down highways during testing, let alone airspace.

the northeast of the state is actually pretty far from WSMR, and no launches from WSMR leave the range that I'm aware of (or at least haven't for a long time. They did launch a V2 after WWII, and it went the wrong direction and hit the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez.)

Are there cruise missiles that operate at those altitudes? Seems like "sitting duck" height for a cruise missile.

Altitude fits the mission.

If you're throwing Tomahawks at the Taliban, you'll get longer range from a higher altitude approach, with little risk of being detected let alone shot down.

If you're trying to hit Moscow, by all means, try to avoid radar by going 50 feet off the ground.

Because cruise missiles regularly do close unannounced fly-by's of passenger jets in civilian airspace /s.

this is not reddit

Depends. In the 80s there were “UFO” sightings in upstate NY which were tomahawk missiles flying between Rome and Griffis AFB for testing purposes. I believe they appeared triangular from some angles due to landing gear.

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