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Comment by mattr47 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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