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Comment by H8crilA | Hacker News Reader

BTW, this is (also) why the occasional Russian missile successfully penetrates the eastern flank of Europe. The damage potential of switching your entire air defense setup to a more aggressive posture will eventually result in civilian casualties. This happens everywhere, just the other day an American F-18 was shot down by an American destroyer in the Red Sea, and an F-18 carries additional deconfliction equipment that an airliner doesn't have. As of today Europe is still using the peacetime kosher method of "we need to intercept it with a combat jet, have a look, ask the president, then maybe shoot it down".

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It's also the reason the US (last I checked*) has standing orders not to attempt to down the drones of unknown origin (adversary espionage, I guess) that swarm at military bases. The risk of accidentally attacking a civilian aircraft vastly outweighs—what they assess as—the immediate threat of the drones.

When there was a panic about the Chinese spy balloon last year, the US sent armed F-22's to shoot down... at least three different unmanned civilian balloons [0,1].

edit: I think I was wrong; apparently the US has a new "deadly force" order as of last week [2].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34824653 ("Hobby Club’s Missing Balloon Feared Shot Down by USAF (aviationweek.com)") 371 comments

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34814717 ("The US Air Force may have shot down an amateur radio pico balloon over Canada (rtl-sdr.com)", 168 comments

[2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/12/us-temporarily-b... ("US temporarily bans drones in parts of NJ, may use “deadly force” against aircraft")

No, I think you're right.

I'm quite sure the "deadly force" wording was for effect, more than any kind of actual change in posture or practice. Unless I'm mistaken there are still plenty of drones being seen in NJ and they're not blasting them out of the sky. And they've always had the option of lethal force around bases anyway.

    what they assess as—the immediate threat of the drones

None of us know for sure but I think the immediate threat of the drones is negligible. If US bases are leaking signals that can be intercepted by drones overhead then these same signals could be just as easily intercepted by cars driving past the bases or nearby homes. And as far as the visible spectrum is concerned all the major players have satellites overhead anyway.

And as you say, the risks of shooting drones down are high. Damage to nearby property. Accidental shootdowns of innocent craft. Successful shootdowns would reveal our capabilities. Unsuccessful shootdowns would reveal our inability to deal with the threat. And in aggregate this would all give the enemy lots of intel as to where we do and don't have defenses. And open war (!!!) over our skies is, to put it mildly, kind of a big deal. There are, to put it mildly, global economic consequences.

Of course, that's all if these drones are of hostile origin, which I think is still a very open question.

If these drones are "ours," which would be weird but also plausible, then the "deadly force" note in the FAA notice could just be part of the cover story.

> If US bases are leaking signals that can be intercepted by drones overhead then these same signals could be just as easily intercepted by cars driving past the bases or nearby homes

Not really. Some signals can be very much unidirectional (eg, visible only to an overhead drone) instead of omnidirectional (eg, a car).

Just curious; what kind of signals would be uni-directionally beaming upwards? For communicating with aircrafts that directly hover above the base? Wouldn't that be really limiting in terms of usefulness?

Satellites.

Satellite base stations

I'm surprised the US doesn't carry bigger drones with butterfly nets.

But those drones would have to wear the same uniforms as the Keystone Cops to put it to full effect.

They could send Spiderman Drones with web slingers!

https://www.fun.com/marvel-3-inch-spider-man-flying-figure-i...

In the US there are also major restrictions to federal US military operating on US soil. [0]

Thus, any action (or effectors traveling) outside base boundaries would generally be illegal.

Given the mobility of drones and desire to prevent their encroachment on bases in the first place, the appropriately legal unit for this would be non-federalized national guard air defense units, tasked by the state governor to intervene.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act

The Posse Comitatus Act restricts the military from engaging in civil law enforcement. It doesn’t prevent the military from using force to defend US soil or airspace. For instance, on 9/11, fighter jets were scrambled to intercept Flight 93; they just didn’t reach it until the passengers had already forced the plane down.

The 9/11 military airspace defense mission was a mass of confusion, as a consequence of the then-novelty of civilian airliner suicide hijackings and split information between the FAA and NORAD.

Hypothetically, the fighters launched could have shot down a civilian plane, but it would have taken direct presidential authorization (i.e. national emergency).

In the absence of an immediate threat, that authorization isn't going to happen.

Drones in most cases are a civil law enforcement matter.

They're not obviously the actors of a foreign nation state, are not an invasion, and are not posing an immediate threat.

They are breaking civil aviation laws.

You're still vastly overstating the scope of the Posse Comitatus Act. As a matter of policy, the US military is cautious about intercepting hostile aircraft in American airspace[1], but the Posse Comitatus Act doesn't prevent it from doing so.

In particular, your claim that "any action (or effectors traveling) outside base boundaries would generally be illegal" is not only false but facially absurd, since it would imply that the US military is statutorily prevented from intercepting enemy bombers or responding to an invasion of American soil.

[1] The reasons for which are well discussed here: https://www.navalgazing.net/Thoughts-on-the-Chinese-Balloon

Drones can capture much higher resolution images, and from very different angles, than satellites. Both are useful, and neither really replaces the other. A high-res composite image taken from multiple angles and exposures can confirm or refute what was just a hunch from satellite imagery alone.

> None of us know for sure but I think the immediate threat of the drones is negligible. If US bases are leaking signals that can be intercepted by drones overhead then these same signals could be just as easily intercepted by cars driving past the bases or nearby homes. And as far as the visible spectrum is concerned all the major players have satellites overhead anyway.

You can also do radio frequency signals intercepts from space, too. You need a big antenna on your satellite, but it's essentially a solved problem. Spaceborne SIGINT goes back to at least the early 70s.

The problem with satellites however is that they cannot loiter, so the window in which they can gather data is limited and predictable. They are also essentially fixed on their track - changing orbit requires fuel. Drones (and old-fashioned spy planes) do not suffer from that limitation.

Tossing a battery-powered radio in a gallon ziplock into the woods outside the chainlink for the base also works, and would have more loitering capability than a drone.

Clearly. But it would not be overhead and might suffer from shielding by buildings etc.

So throw it in a gallon ziplock inside some rope and stuff and toss into a tree. In any case, a drone has about 15-30 min of loitering time while a radio-in-a-bag has potentially weeks or even months. I know which I would choose for spying on radio transmissions.

There are geostationary satellites. they loiter.

What they don’t have is high accuracy pointing. If you want to listen to activity on 128MHz at a specific military base from GEO you’re going to be getting a huge amount of interference from everything else in CONUS on the same frequency. At LEO you can do much much better pointing with your antenna.

Geostationary is only possible on very specific orbits - over the equator on one height. Any other orbit cannot be geostationary.

It's not 'for effect'. It's the legal description of use of a firearm by police/military.

The "drone threat" is a bunch of mass hysteria. Every photo I was shown was obviously a passenger jet liner.

   It's not 'for effect'. It's the legal description of 
   use of a firearm by police/military.

That's what I meant by "for effect." They were already able to shoot you.

Ergo a reminder that the military or police can shoot you is for effect; it does not represent a change to the status quo.

Drones are dangerous. First, they can take high-quality photos, second they can jam the radio communications and GPS, third, they may contain explosives.

> Unless I'm mistaken there are still plenty of drones being seen in NJ and they're not blasting them out of the sky.

Would these drones be running FAA-standard navigation lights and a transponder? Because that seems to be the case for most of these drone spottings :)

I know what you're saying! Clearly the vast majority of these drone sightings seem to be regular aircraft.

Some do not seem to be, although my skepticism is high because I have seen a lot of faked UFO videos over the years and faking points of light in the night sky is like, the easiest thing to fake in a fake video/photo.

While I think this is unlikely, we could imagine that whoever is doing shady drone stuff might want to actually observe some basic safety rules, ridiculous as that sounds.

Suppose for a second that these drones are a "flex" from China/Russia/whoever. Causing a midair collision with an aircraft because they're running dark, or risking the chance of that because they're running dark, is a lot more serious than just flying some drones.

And if it's aliens, hey, maybe they're just trying to... uh, fit in by mimicing our airplanes' safety lights? =)

What adversarial intelligence would fly drones at night extremely low with their lights on?

IMO most likely commercial LIDAR mapping by some company that’d rather remain stealth.

None and in most cases it’s not even clear it’s happening. Due to perspective, a plane far away and a drone up close could look very similar at night when all you can see are lights in a dark sky.

Totally, it at least seems quite clear it's not happening anywhere near the extent to which it's suspected of happening.

Drones fly around. It's legal. It's fun. It's interesting for countless reasons to countless people. Really speaks to the state of our information environment that so many have been thrown into an absolute tizzy.

Most people just don’t know much about drones or planes really. They don’t know how their brain interprets what it sees. Etc

It’s obviously just mass hysteria.

This would make a fascinating case study about how many people have never looked up at their own skies before. I also wouldn't be surprised if the hysteria is being amplified to distract from all the other nonsense in the world right now.

A star light-years away also looks the same, and it's pretty hilarious when they're mistaken for "drones"

Pretty much any object in featureless space: ships on a flat body of water (sea, lake), aircraft in the sky, objects on flat terrain (plains, taiga, desert, sand, snow), objects in space.

Even on other solar system bodies (the Moon, Mars, etc.), it's quite difficult to gauge scale and distance without terrestrial references (trees, structures, etc.) to guide the eye.

Sadly when the United States Coast Guard reports being followed by unknown drones (and unknown drones have been reported around military space by military personnel for years) and the government response is to say 'we don't know, and we are doing nothing' people tend to become concerned. The best way to stop vigilanties is to have a system of laws and and government that follows the laws and that instill trust in the people. When the government just shrugs, well... that's how you end up with horrible/idiotic vigilanytism.

I'm a government institutions guy, but yes, let's attack people for... following basic human nature, not the government big brains that ignore basic realities of human nature about needing trust in stable/steady government institutions who instead just demand 'faith in government' that isn't earned. The government isn't just failing in actions, they are failing in understanding this BASIC requirement for governing.

So... outlaw drones? Or are you proposing we just start shooting people's toys out of the sky? At what cost per drone is justifiable to achieve this? A couple hundred thousand dollars and risk of misfires, aviation accidents, and shrapnel?

I think the people panicking about drones are not going to be a fan of a federal ban on them. Just my two cents though.

I'm not proposing anything. I'm just pointing out when the government fails to lead/leaves a vacuum people can quickly turn to vigilantist/dumb type behavior and follow the first person/thought/idea that fills the void.

Here the government said 'the United States Coast Guard mistook some 747s far away for 12 drones following their boat and if it wasn't planes then actually we assessed the 12 drones and found they aren't a threat, we don't know what they are, whose they are, or were they came from' and expected people to just go, hmm, ok, nevermind then.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Government is there to help control/direct what it gets filled with when it's a societal one.

Yeah totally... we want the government to be at the ready with some answer for literally any event that confuses any moron with a Twitter account lest it blow up into many morons with Twitter accounts getting confused.

The government doesn't know, it has no real responsibility or right to know, and it says it doesn't know. People extrapolating that into ridiculous theories cannot really be pinned on the government.

Next up: "I saw a shadow in the woods near my house and the government said they have no clue what it is!!!!"

You, an allegedly levelheaded person: "Well nature abhors a vacuum! It's a failure to lead not to have answers to such questions!"

No, that's actually not a levelheaded take.

You might not like the take, but all I am doing is pointing out human nature and a basic role government provides.

If you don't enforce laws/proper behavior/provide safety, you get vigilanties. If you don't provide answers, people go looking, and gullible people settle for the first thing they find.

No one is confused about why these people are panicking. They’re panicking because they’ve offloaded their thinking and information processing to algorithmic bullshit-amplification machines.

That’s why I’m being aggressive against this same “errr well yah know the government should have answers!” bullshit you’re purveying right here.

That’s what they want you to think. The sailors on the Iranian aircraft carrier and the Bigfoot pay close attention to FAA regulations.

"It's also the reason the US (last I checked*) has standing orders not to attempt to down the drones of unknown origin"

I think it depends. The smaller drones are allowed to be zapped using equiptment designed to take down drowns. They generally aren't shooting traditional munitions at drones domestically for multiple safety reasons, unless they are over a specific size/altitude.

The government has no right to destroy property (by any method) of private citizens who are flying drones when there is no evidence of illegality or of them being a credible threat.

To say "flying a drone makes it a credible threat" to say "drones are illegal," which someone is free to take up as their legislative priority.

If you're flying your drone in a restricted area, then it would be illegal. Many of the drone-downing systems do not permanently destroy it.

On a side note, do you have a TRUST or Part 107?

Yeah, duh if it's in a restricted area. That's not what the drone hysteria is about.

> Many of the drone-downing systems do not permanently destroy it.

Uhh yeah if a consumer grade drone falls 300 feet out of the sky then yes it's destroyed.

"Yeah, duh if it's in a restricted area. That's not what the drone hysteria is about."

Look up TFRs. Look up all the other restrictions these drones are supposed to be following. Tell me how they're legal.

"Uhh yeah if a consumer grade drone falls 300 feet out of the sky then yes it's destroyed."

Not irreparably. Some components will.

First TFRs in NJ went up on Dec 18... and suuspiiciousslyyy.... drone sightings disappear!

https://nypost.com/2024/12/28/us-news/mystery-nj-drone-sight...

> Not irreparably. Some components will.

Okay.

Lol what are you even arguing right now? It is not legal for the USG to destroy, seize, or damage people's property when they are not breaking the law or credibly threatening people. At the times of the drone sightings, there was no evidence whatsoever of them breaking the law or credibly threatening people.

Please state your position explicitly instead of this silly dance.

Important to note that it was a panic about an alleged chinese spy balloon, but in all likelihood it was just a weather balloon. There was no proof it was a spy balloon.

Ummm, no. We recovered the balloons and they were full of surveillance equipment.

They seemed to not have a way to phone home, so more than likely China’s plan was to recover the balloon to get the data. That may be what you recall. For all we know they had been doing so for years successfully.

But they were definitely spy balloons.

The US downed and recovered a Chinese balloon, not balloons.

The 2023 incident is pretty well written up on Wikipedia[1].

There was one Chinese surveillance balloon that was shot down. Subsequent shoot-downs of balloons over the arctic and Great Lakes were not attributed to China - one that was recovered was definitively identified as a private weather balloon.

There were also previous Chinese surveillance balloon overflights - as well as one over Central America - that were not shot down.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Chinese_balloon_incident

> in all likelihood it was just a weather balloon

Normal weather balloons are 20ft in diameter. This one was 200 feet in diameter and carried quite a payload - about the size of a couple of box cars. Additionally it had propellers and the ability to steer itself.

> There was no proof it was a spy balloon.

There was a preponderance of evidence - from the route of the balloon (over US strategic nuclear missle silos), to the equipment that was recovered to radio intercptions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Chinese_balloon_incident

This is also why there was reluctance to shoot the balloon down until it had passed over the ocean. The enormous payload container was a definite threat to life and limb if shot down over a populated area, and most of the US has at least a token population.

It’s also much easier to do less damage on the drone itself by shooting it over water than land. Honestly I think that played a major factor where they shot it down.

A lot of this stuff is “doing something” to calm people down. People are losing their minds.

Where I live in upstate NY, Nextdoor.com was losing its shit over a “drone”, actually a lidar mapping plane, and some of the dumber people were suggesting taking shots at the Iranians.

I’m waiting for the next seemingly inevitable object lesson: it’s insanely illegal, federally illegal, to shoot at flying objects, for what I would have hoped were obvious reasons. But it seems we’re still really rather dumb as a collective.

> obvious reasons

It's maybe worth mentioning that the obvious reasons almost entirely have to do with the things you'd hit in the air, not once the bullet descended. If everyone on earth suddenly shot upward at around 80 degrees from the ground, you'd expect approximately zero casualties on average from the bullets falling and lethally striking surface objects (there would be a number of welts and bruises as well as minor property damage, but even that is less likely than you might suspect).

People are routinely killed by falling bullets. It turns out that the vast majority of idiots firing blindly into the air don't know or care to shoot only straight up, and it would be the same problem for whichever idiots were trying to shoot down drones.

> People are routinely killed by falling bullets.

Do you have a citation for that? I can't find any numbers on people getting hit by falling bullets, let alone fatalities. Things let celebratory gunfire don't seem to be comparable since people tend to congregate outside for celebrations resulting in larger groups of potential unintentional targets.

Here you go:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/201323

Celebratory gunfire incidents were included, but only make up 4.6% of the total.

In approximately one year:

>Altogether, 317 persons received stray bullet injuries;

>142 (44.8%) were female, and 176 (55.5%) were outside the age range 15 to 34 years.

>Most individuals (258, 81.4%) were unaware of the events leading to the gunfire that caused their injuries.

>Many (129, 40.7%) were at home; most of these persons (88, 68.2%) were indoors.

>Sixty-five persons (20.5%) died, 18 (27.7%) of them at the shooting site and 55 (84.6%) on the day they were shot.

>Fourteen persons received nonfatal injuries by secondary mechanisms.

I have not logged the citations, but I distinctly recall reading on the order of one-two news reports per year of people being killed by falling bullets in multiple different countries, including US, Brazil, and several middle eastern countries.

Also, injuries and one fatality were confirmed by Mythbusters in [0]. Read the account for Episode 50, which was the only myth to receive all three ratings (Busted, Plausible, and Confirmed) at the same time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(2006_season)

Some data on stray bullet fatalities just in Rio:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1284427/stray-bullets-vi...

I'm not sure that's at all the same thing with the extremely high rate of violent crime involving guns in Brazil. Pointing a gun straight at a city background, missing your specific target, and still injuring/killing somebody is very different from pointing a gun at the sky and having the 170 ft/s bullet fall, manage to hit that same highly populated region, and cause problems.

The point is that all sky-pointed bullets are NOT going only 170ft/sec.

Yes, it is reasonably established that bullets fired straight up do not regain their initial velocity on the way back down.

But, at less-than-vertical firing angles, they can retain a lot of their initial 4-figure-fps velocity, and how much is very dependent on particular trajectory, wind, bullet composition, and initial angle. Dependent enough that it's specifically outlawed in many states.

So, don't go glibly firing off skyward celebratory shots (over)confident in your understanding of the physics (or implicitly advocating it). You might be willing to take the risk, but no one else is willingly undertaking the risk you are creating.

I honestly can't believe that people would argue that they should be allowed to fire guns up in the air, lmao. You & I both know people don't indicate while driving, so I'm sure we're not that surprised, though.

No, I agree. Brazil is likely leaning towards immediate contact and absorption of small arms in that localized region of conflict rather than horizon aimed rifle fire like you’d expect with people shooting at traditional aircraft they believe is as close as a drone would be, towards what I presume would be a residential, no-fly zone, military airspace, etc.

It’s really not the collective. It’s every town and cities loonies that now have formed a small but vocal subset of the population thanks to the Internet.

I think a solid 95% of what people think are drones are actually passenger planes so I’m glad we’re not firing at them.

> This happens everywhere, just the other day an American F-18 was shot down by an American destroyer in the Red Sea, and an F-18 carries additional econfliction equipment that an airliner doesn't have.

The Houthis claim the F-18 was downed by them[1], so it's still not clear if this was an actual friendly fire incident. This is consistent with reports the carrier retreated to northern red sea soon after the incident.

[1] https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241222-yemens-houthis-cl...

No, it's pretty clear.

It is as clear as this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_F-117A_shootdown

That depends on whether you trust the Houthis or the US Navy's sheepish apology for shooting at two F-18s (one missed), which will almost certainly have career consequences for somebody.

The carrier "retreating" is also consistent with a lot of other scenarios, including just having fucked up majorly and needing a safe place to spend some quality time yelling at people.

The Houthis have no credibility, so I'm inclined to believe the Navy here.

They claim a lot of things, but whatever air defense they have comes from Iran, and Iran, as we just saw, isn't capable of shooting down IAF F-15s flying over their own airspace. Ansar Allah did not shoot down an American F-18. I don't believe Ansar Allah has any meaningful air defense at all; it would make no strategic sense for them to invest in it, they have no hope of maintaining air superiority against any of their adversaries. Like Hezbollah, which trained them, and which also has no meaningful air defense, their strategy is to be hard to bomb effectively.

The IAF did not fly over Iranian airspace, they launched ballistic missiles from Iraq.

I'm reading conflicting reports, but let's stipulate that; I don't think it makes any difference to the point I'm making. The better, clearer example is Lebanon, which hosts the crown jewel of the IRGC's proxy forces, and which doesn't have even a pretense of modern anti-aircraft defense. What would the point be? These are territories and militaries without meaningful air forces; they have already defaulted away air superiority. Their strategy is for that not to matter.

According to BBC Persian (quoting Israeli sources) and many Israeli media , the IAF flew "hundreds" of sorties over Iranian airspace on that eventful night in October.

The reporting is that they were F35s though, not F15.

Iran's air defence system is based on the older Russian S300, which is incapable of detecting them.

Of course it wasn't that long ago that Iran was flying F14s and had complete air superiority over its neighbours. How the times have changed.

I've seen credible reporting of F-35's, F-15's, and F-16's, all of which are platforms the IAF operates.

Very possible.

We also now know that the Israelis had informed the Iranians just before the attack through diplomatic channels of the impending attack, and that it would only contain specific military objectives.

Is the S300 just that useless? Possible. Did the Iranians decide to not respond and to "take one on the chin" in order to avoid a cycle of ever increasing conflict? Maybe. Had espionage already disabled Iran's air defence system? Also possible. We probably won't know for another 100 years.

Yeah, I don't think the strike on Iran shed as much light on this question as I'd originally thought it might, but it still seems clearly to be the case that air defense is not a big part of the Axis of Resistance strategy. Ansar Allah fought an open war against Saudi Arabia in the mid-late 2010s, during which the Royal Saudi Air Force routinely flew over Houthi-held territory, and so far as I know they've never verifiably shot a flight down.

Again, I think the most useful model here is Lebanon. Hezbollah has a desultory complement of SAM launchers, but no meaningful control over its airspace.

Oh yes that's just absolutely fanciful boasting by the Houthis.

The Houthis were probably not far off from claiming to have shot down the Ingenuity chopper which NASA lost on Mars . In reality they can't shoot down a Cessna 172.

I think they've taken down a couple MQ-9's, at least one of which we acknowledged.

The actual quote is:

> Saree explained that the operation “was carried out using eight cruise missiles and 17 drones, resulting in the downing of an F-18 fighter jet while the destroyers attempted to intercept the Yemeni drones and missiles.”

So I think its possible that it was both a friendly fire incident and that the downing was the restult of the the Yemini attack.

Ward Carroll (former F-14 aviator) gives a complete description of the friendly-fire incident:

Navy Cruiser Shot Down Super Hornet During Carrier Approach (and Nearly Hit Another One)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoYOsX2GpX4

There’s no “identify friend or foe” excuse for shooting down an airliner beyond human error.

A missle travels at tremendous speeds and require automated defence systems to neutralize the target at a safe explosion distance in the sky, which often does not afford humans to make “phone calls” and “meetings” and “discussion” to down the threat, before it potentially blasts a population centre or a military installation with thousands of soldiers and civilians at the base.

Military doesnt decide between downing an airliner and not downing it, But rather a risk between downing an missile that can “potentially” be an airliner that god knows why is in a restricted airspace, and letting it fly and risk getting killed those thousands or even millions of people (if a population centre/city) get exploded with bombs and missiles.

> Military doesnt decide between downing an airliner and not downing it, But rather a risk between downing an missile that can “potentially” be an airliner that god knows why is in a restricted airspace, and letting it fly and risk getting killed those thousands or even millions of people (if a population centre/city) get exploded with bombs and missiles.

With zero knowledge of how well-equipped the Russian military is, could they really be so far behind that they're unable to determine the difference between an commercial airlines and a high-speed missile?

At a glance, just looking at the trajectory of this UFO for half a minute would be enough to determine if it's an airline with stable flight path, VS a missile that has some sort of trajectory that doesn't look at all like a airline. Not to mention the radar signature has to be different in at least some ways.

But again, I don't know the capability or process of the Russian military, in a high-tension environment sometimes shit just goes wrong even though it shouldn't.

> With zero knowledge of how well-equipped the Russian military is, could they really be so far behind that they're unable to determine the difference between an commercial airlines and a high-speed missile

If they exclude radar signature of commercial airliners, and let them fly, it will just make weapon makers start designing high-speed missiles with the radar signature of an airliner lol.

There is a reason why a lot of military and sci-fi movies have the phrase “aircraft with radar signature of a bird” , anything that the military excludes or allows to pass off, just becomes the cloning target of missile makers under the tag of “camouflage”.

> ... it will just make weapon makers start designing high-speed missiles with the radar signature of an airliner lol.

Well, the problem with that is that airliners are (relatively speaking) slow as fuck. A "high-speed missile" with the radar cross section of an airliner would be mind-meltingly obvious as a threat even to automated defense robots.

Iran mistook PS752 for a cruise missile [0]. It's not an impossible mistake; a cruise missile is (often) a subsonic, jet-powered object.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_International_Airlines...

Point of order: A cruise missile isn't a high-speed missile. It's (almost?) always a big, slow, lumbering bastard, as far as missiles go.

There are cruise missiles powered by ramjets that go significantly supersonic, but for the most part ballistic missiles are easier to use, longer range, and harder to intercept. The prospect of anti-air systems effective enough to pose ballistic missiles trouble in a "near-peer" non-nuclear conflict is recent. Both maneuvering-capable ramjet/scramjet cruise missiles and (the significantly easier) maneuverable hypersonic re-entry vehicles that launch ballistically, are the subject of recently fielded early models, active development & active testing because of that prospect.

Hence the term "cruise", which in every other context means not traveling especially fast.

Airliners aren't slow by cruise missiles standards: supersonic cruise missiles are few and far between, and most cruise missiles in fact fly roughly at the speed of an airliner (between 800 and 1000km/h).

You're the second person to talk about cruise missiles in this subthread.

The comment I replied to (and quoted in my reply) talked specifically about "high-speed missiles". Nearly all cruise missiles are most emphatically NOT that sort of missile.

Stealth airplanes might have the radar cross section of a bird but they don't have the same flight characteristics (altitude, speed.) If you can manage to see it, you won't confuse it for a bird.

put another way, your average seagull ain't cruising at 10000 feet @ 600 mph

A flock of migratory birds could very easily be cruising at that height, and if in a fast moving jetstream or similar could be moving at hundreds of miles an hour when referenced to a ground based source.

That came as news to me. Some fly at 11200m/37,000 feet.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_birds_by_flight_heig...

If you've ever dropped a French fry at the beach, you know that's not true.

> it will just make weapon makers start designing high-speed missiles with the radar signature of an airliner lol.

The weapons industry isn't that enthusiastic about blatantly violating the Geneva Conventions. There would be massive diplomatic costs to making, selling, buying or firing missiles with fake civilian transponders.

When I look at current conflicts, I’m not sure that the Geneva convention features anywhere in anyone’s thought processes.

You are describing a war crime.

Ukraine uses (among other things) fixed-wing drones with similar characteristics to civilian aircraft. Some of them are *actual* civilian aircraft, retrofitted into unmanned suicide drones,

https://www.flightglobal.com/military-uavs/ukraine-appears-t... ("Ukraine appears to deploy modified A-22 ultralights as suicide UAVs")

Unmanned kamikazes?

They are just DIY cruise missiles really.

None of them remotely resemble an E190 though, which is about 50x the size of a cruise missile, communicates effectively with air traffic control and broadcasts ADS-B signals telling you what it is (at least when you're not jamming it...)

Radar doesn't exactly tell you the size of of a contact. Sure, you can measure the power of the return signal, correct for distance and get something that loosely correlates with size. But it correlates much more strongly with other things.

You're also making the assumption here that it was a modern Russian system. This wasn't exactly close to the current fighting, its entirely possible this radar was manufactured in the Soviet Union. I don't think those receive a lot (or any) civilian broadcasts.

> You're also making the assumption here that it was a modern Russian system

People do like to provide their very important opinion completely oblivious what Grozny is farther away from eg Crimea than Kiev.

Since Russia reduced Grozny to rubble relatively recently, it's probably not that old.

Most A2A systems has wheels (or floats) and can thus easily be relocated. While it probably had good stuff once, I think all the high end equipment once located here has moved closer to Ukraine by now. What's left is probably the worst (human or technological) that's left.

> Ukraine uses (among other things) fixed-wing drones with similar characteristics to civilian aircraft.

Including taking off from commercial airports on publicly available schedules, on predetermined airways/corridors, and broadcasting 1080 MHZ ADS-B data?

> Some of them are actual civilian aircraft, retrofitted into unmanned suicide drones

literally small prop planes with guidance systems and instead of ~4 passengers it's lots of explosives. commonly used against Russian oil depots, etc.

small radar signature, and a lot of ambiguity with civilian aircraft.

Confusion with civilian prop aircraft, not commercial jet airliners flying at vastly higher altitude and speeds.

An E190 on approach (remember, this airplane was trying to land at Grozny) has an approach speed between 125-145 knots (depending on load). A Cessna 172 for example has a cruise speed of ~120 knots and can cruise up to 10k feet. A typical instrument landing glide path is 3 degrees - that intercepts 10k feet at ~60km out.

The likelihood of confusing a regional jet with a small prop plane (purely based on speed/heading/altitude) is way higher during landing.

While it crashed near an airport it doesn’t seem like the aircraft was targeted at low altitude and low speeds.

This aircraft was trying to land so it likely had much lower altitude and speed than usual.

It doesn’t appear that the aircraft was attacked on final approach. Instead flying much higher and faster than prop drones.

Wait a minute. I thought they hit some angry birds?

All of these decisions are made by soldiers. Russian air defense troops are no doubt overworked, poorly treated, under intense pressure and probably motivated by avoiding going to the front.

Chances are, an operator or officer made a bad call. They are cogs in a killing machine.

I would have thought the aircraft’s transponder would have been the first clue. I can identify nearly every aircraft over my house right now using a $30 USB dongle, including callsign, airline, flight number, altitude, speed, and bearing.

It depends a lot on the context (weather, altitude) and equipment (Russia has a lot of equipment, some of it new, some of it old, some of it ancient).

Without minimizing the personal contribution to this disaster of every serviceman, IMHO the blame, first and foremost, rests firmly with whoever the bloody hell decided to keep the airspace open nearly three years into a war. Civilian airspace is open above Chechnya and Dagestan while the VKS is lobing missiles from/from above the Caspian Sea, and planes are landing at Sochi while Novorossiysk gets hit by drones. This is nuts even by post-Soviet standards. There's a very good reason why Ukraine closed their airspace almost right away and continue to keep it closed.

To pre-emptively address the "but that would be too costly" angle: well, maybe that should've been factored in before greenlighting the invasion. Boo-hoo. Does keeping it open look cheap now?

In a quick decision, in a high-stress scenario during an actual attack, possibly. Even if they have the capacity to make that decision correctly otherwise, every system—including the human element—is fallible, and procedures in those circumstances are likely to err on the side of safety-from-attack, rather than safety-for-potential-attacker.

(OTOH, the rerouting of the plane afterward was clearly intentional murder with the hope it would help cover up the shooting incident, whether or not the shooting itself was an accident.)

Different types of missiles exist. A cruise missile (for which the Russians have a much better name - winged missile) can be confused with an airplane, as it is essentially a drone with a turbojet engine. A ballistic missile travelling at supersonic/hypersonic speeds is much easier to discriminate based on velocity alone. Also, those are usually tracked all the way from a launch site using infrared cameras on satellites. The European incursions were mostly cruise missiles and the Iranian mopeds (and at least one ballistic incident that was likely a Ukrainian air defense S-300 missile that the Ukrainians lost control of; this is another problem that happens every now and then to everyone).

Completely irrelevant if there are missiles that fit the profile of something else because some fit the profile of an airliner end of story

Then you are comfortable making a decision that could cost thousands of lives over one with a few hundred without taking in any other information other than a radar bounce that is approximately the same size/speed.

I mean you're largely correct. What I'm saying is that there may be a standing order to destroy all ballistic threats, and to exercise a very high degree of caution (high level approvals for each engagement) with any potential air breathing / subsonic threats. I imagine this is a common order given to Patriot batteries in hot, but not war, areas.

BTW, this is a bit similar to why the US very clearly advertises the Tomahawk as not nuclear capable - so that a few subsonic blips do not trigger a strategic exchange. The Russians do not do that, many of their commonly used missiles are dual purpose.

The Tomahawk was deployed with nuclear warheads, in several variants, between 1983–2010 or 2013 [0]. As far as I can tell, only the ground-launched variants were consistently advertised as non-nuclear, and that was to comply with the bilateral treaty obligations of the INF [1]—and there was a ground-launched nuclear Tomahawk, too [2], which was destroyed in 1991 when the INF treaty came into effect.

I don't think that there was ever a *unilateral* US aversion to these things. We've fielded large numbers [3] of nuclear-warhead cruise missiles—air-, sea-, and ground-launched, spanning much of the Cold war. We're currently developing a new one right now [4].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomahawk_(missile_family)#Vari...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate-Range_Nuclear_For...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGM-109G_Gryphon

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nuclear_cruise_missil... ("Category: Nuclear cruise missiles of the United States")

[4] https://news.usni.org/2024/06/06/report-to-congress-to-on-nu... ("Report to Congress on Nuclear-Armed Sea-Launched Cruise Missile")

Ugh, I was clearly wrong about the Tomahawk, and I don't know why I thought so. It's probably not a believable story for the adversary, so such self-inhibition cannot yield any strategic results anyways.

Are you meaning (for example) old radar equipment with generated profiles unable to distinguish between what more modern equipment could?

I can think of at least two incidents where the military was deciding between downing and not downing an airliner, and decided on the former. Oddly, they both involve Korean Air and the Soviet military.

One hopes the modern Russian military is less enthusiastic about such things, but I wouldn’t want to bet my life on it.

This also occurred at least once with Canada/US military (but still Korean aircraft) during the panic on September 11, 2001 — an aircraft that was actually just doing normal stuff, very nearly got shot down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_085

I don't know about "nearly got shot down". They were escorted to a different airport and ordered to land, but despite several miscommunications they followed instructions and landed safely.

> One hopes the modern Russian military is less enthusiastic about such things

Given that they have just done it again, I’d bet they have plenty of enthusiasm.

The past couple of times look likely to be legitimate confusion, probably coupled with a lack of care. In the KAL shootdowns, the Soviets intercepted, saw that they were airliners, and shot them down anyway.

Prigozhin was shot down when on a commercial flight wasn’t he?

That was a private jet, and probably a bomb planted on the plane before flight, although it’s hard to say for sure.

> In the KAL shootdowns, the Soviets intercepted, saw that they were airliners, and shot them down anyway.

As I understand the pilot in the KAL 007 shoot down claimed that he visually identified the plane as a Boeing-type airliner years later, but also claimed he did not report that to control because it was not material since such aircraft could be readily converted to intelligence work which was what was the concern for which it was being intercepted. There is no additional support for this, and lots of things the pilot claimed about the incident are inconsistent with the evidence from radar tracks, flight data recorders of the shot down plane, and the records of the Soviet communications relating to the attack, so this particular unverifiable claim probably shouldn't be given much weight.

KAL 902, sure, we know that the pilot identified it as an airliner, tried to convince command not to have it shot down, but then followed the order to shoot it down.

Is there any doubt that the pilot who intercepted KAL007 got a decent look at the plane first? It should have been pretty obviously an airliner as long as it wasn’t miles and miles away.

The heat signature from multiple big turbofan engines and the radar signatures for the same could look similar to a bomber or cargo military plane, so here again a human needs to discriminate somehow.

Humans can’t but maybe AIs can coordinate at light speed to determine at the last minute if a plane should be shot down or not.

Thats not true at all, and I have the receipts to prove it. When the Russians shot down KAL007, it was preceeded by numerous phone calls and meetings. Russian pilots cannot fire missiles without remote authorization from central command. The chain of communications is well documented. KAL007 was first radar identified and fighters were scrambled at 16:33. They obtained visual contact at or around 18:05 and reported it to be a potential civilian airliner. After much discussion, an order to shoot it down was given, which they did, 21 minutes later at as 18:26, nearly 2 hours after it was detected on air defence radar.

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-shot-in-the-dark-the-u...

KAL 007 was shot down as a suspected spy plane in peacetime, not as a suspected attack weapon in war time.

Please don’t mistake explanation for excuse.

> deconfliction equipment

By this do you mean "electronic warfare" equipment, like radar/laser detectors and other such "target searching and seeking" detectors, as well as jammers, spoofers, and other such "search or seek disruption" devices?

I think they mean fancy IFF (Identify Friend or Foe) emitters. If you think about it, it sounds like a pain of a problem, the plane must be as stealthy as possible, but somehow, during those moments, communicate in a non-spoofable way that it's a friendly. No idea how they do this. Is there any interesting textbook on electronic warfare, I wonder?

> Is there any interesting textbook on electronic warfare, I wonder?

I know that there are unclassified textbooks on this very topic, but I've long forgotten their names.

> If you think about it, it sounds like a pain of a problem, the plane must be as stealthy as possible, but somehow, during those moments, communicate in a non-spoofable way that it's a friendly. No idea how they do this.

Well, part of this problem is pretty trivial to solve: if you're coming back from a mission and are well in friendly airspace, you don't need to be stealthy at all, so you turn on your radio transmitters.

It's my understanding that when you're on a mission where you need to be as hard to spot as possible, you turn off all unnecessary transmitters and rely on Command telling Air Traffic Control and other interested parties where you're operating so as to reduce the chance that you collide with another aircraft and/or get shot down by friendlies.

DSSS is magic. Truly. It's like you can create an ~infinite number of "new frequencies" to send on, each being orthogonal to any other, then chose them cryptographically as needed. With enough care it's possible to make it difficult for the adversary to even detect the presence of a signal. And the tech used by the likes of F-35 with MADL and low-probability-of-intercept radars may be even fancier than that.

That being said in the Red Sea incident they likely were not stealthy at all. For one F-18 has a rather big cross section, it's a 4th generation jet. For another the Houthis are not known to operate any sensible air defense (I may be wrong here, someone please correct me if I'm wrong).

Any serious hardware Ansar Allah operates is provided by Iran, and Iran is not capable of shooting down IAF aircraft flying over their own territory. Ansar Allah did not shoot down an F-18.

I don't know either, but thought about it a lot at one point.

First, you only respond to correctly encrypted/signed requests. Everything else you ignore.

So, second, once you have your valid request, you respond to it, also in an encrypted fashion. IIRC F-35 can use their radars, with their bean-forming abilities, for stealthy comms, sending a very narrow beam of radio signals to the recipient.

And if this is fantasy, I suppose by the time you receive an IFF query, you know you're about to be shot at. So you might as well respond, sacrificing stealth. Hence why you want to really be sure you're really asked by your side, rather than receiving a spoof request.

Airlines just broadcast a ton of public information about themselves, so they don't really need an IFF system. They put their hands up and say "don't shoot, I'm a civilian!".

> by the time you receive an IFF query, you know you're about to be shot at

I don’t think that’s the most common case for an IFF query. AWACS oversight aircraft likely issue more IFF queries than fighter intercepts do. You still want to respond to a friendly AWACS inquiry, even though that aircraft is 100nm away and no direct/immediate threat to you.

100nm (more or less) is the positive identification radar advisory zone for a carrier group airspace... (AKA REDCROWN)

Less than 100 nanometers?

It always gets me when someone abbreviates nautical miles in lowercase even though context is (almost) always clear it can't be nanometers.

An AWACS aircraft within 100 nanometers of you would indeed represent a direct and immediate threat. :)

TIL that nm isn’t actually accepted as an abbreviation for nautical miles. (It’s used so commonly in aviation that I assumed it was correct and it took me 3 or 4 searches to accept that this thing I knew was correct actually wasn’t. Thanks [seriously]!)

Same when people use “mhz” for megahertz

There are a few from Artech house you can find.

AESA radars send radar impulses on different frequencies that appear to the observer to be random (and thus hard to figure out and jam).

They could use something similar for communication. Send the first byte on a frequency, the second byte on another one, etc.... The frequencies could be calculated to be un-distinguishable from the background radio radiation. Of course, both the sender and the receiver have to agree on this mechanism.

They do:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-hopping_spread_spect...

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

The really clever counterpart is how to transmit through your own spread-spectrum jamming. Quiet slots in the jamming must be manipulated in the same way as the active broadcast. For example, this allows communication to a ground convoy that is jamming all frequencies to prevent wireless remote-control IED detonation.

I assumed they meant the military transponder and UHF radio equipment.

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