Free Republic

US forces have deployed the “Doomsday Plane” amid fears of war with Russia as tensions look ready to snap over Syria. Just after US President Donald Trump told Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to “get ready” for a missile strike the feared aircraft took to the sky. US forces put a Boeing E-4B Nightwatch plane into the air from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Indiana. The Nightwatch – also known as the Doomsday Plane – is an airborne nuclear war command centre. It would allow the US to maintain a chain of command in the event of a major war and...

DENVER -- Thousands saw a plane circling the Denver metro area late Wednesday morning, questioning where it may have come from and what it may be doing. Officials at a host of federal organizations had few answers. Denver7 began tracking a flight named IRON99 as it traversed from California over the pacific. It traveled over the Rocky Mountains and eventually over the Denver metro area. Its arrival over the Denver metro is what prompted questions from a host of locals who saw it circling, questioning what it might have been doing. Visually, the plane circled in a racetrack-style oval shape...

A routine training flight by the U.S. Navy’s E-6B Mercury “doomsday plane” captured the attention of sky-watchers this week in Colorado. The four-engine command-and-control plane based on Boeing Co.’s 707 airliner on Wednesday took off from Travis Air Force Base in California and circled over Denver before continuing on to Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma. It was apparently the hour-long racetrack holding pattern that turned the heads. “Did you see this today?” a newscaster at the KMGH, the local ABC affiliate, asked during a broadcast. “There was this plane just circling the metro, circling and circling, and many of...

AMERICA has a doomsday plane. Actually it has four of them. But the US government does not — repeat, DOES NOT — talk openly about its doomsday planes. The doomsday plane is like a mirror to Air Force One — a great big flying working office for the president and his or her staff. But while Air Force One is your everyday, garden variety kind of presidential flying office, the doomsday plane is built and equipped to keep the US government running in the event of a nuclear war or other disaster. It’s a converted 747 called an E-4B, also...