Posted on 12/12/2018 8:18:03 AM PST by BenLurkin
When large, storm-like blips flashed across radar in Southern Illinois and Western Kentucky, the National Weather Service was stunned because it wasnt raining a drop.
All kinds of guesses flared up on social media: a flock of birds; aliens; residue the government uses to control the weather, etc.
But a tweet from Eyewitness News meteorologist Wayne Hart on Tuesday morning seemingly cleared the fog. Citing an unnamed pilot, he said Evansville air traffic control claimed a military C-130 released a stream of chaff radar-jamming material sometimes used during training exercises a few miles northwest of Evansville.
A story from the Courier & Press pointed out that military bases sat near the areas where the blips appeared: Fort Campbell in Kentucky and Scott Air Force Base in Western Illinois.
But if this was a case of military chaff, and it did come from a C-130, that plane didnt come from either of those bases.
Whatever aircraft it was, it was not a Scott Air Force Base craft, Master Sgt. Thomas Doscher said Tuesday morning.
(Excerpt) Read more at courierpress.com ...
Several years ago I personally saw a fighter-sized aircraft drop a pair of flairs over a western city while entering the pattern to an airport. I asked my buddy, the former AF Fighter pilot about that and he said it was almost certainly an accident or mistake on "switchology" while configuring for landing. He said it wouldn't have been intentional, they aren't supposed to drop flares over populated areas or when they are low enough that the flares will hit the ground and potentially start a fire - unless they are actually being engaged of course. Not likely in the instance I witnessed since the pilot continued downwind/base/final as if nothing had happened. The "who, me? Nah, nothing happening here..." approach.
The upshot is, mistakes happen. So maybe the chaff dispensers get reloaded, inventories quietly adjusted, the CO chews out the crew, and no-one outside the unit is ever the wiser.
Over the last couple of years there has been a explosion of new military Radars on the HF frequencies across all bands...so much so its becoming a big problem as they create so much interference.
There isn't enough chaff on a C-130 to begin to create that kind of image on a weather radar or any other type of radar. I have over 5000 hours in the C-130 and am familiar with the chaff and flare capabilities they have. You want enough chaff to confuse a radar-guided missile homing in on you. You don't want so much that you show every radar in an entire enemy country where you are and what direction you're heading.
Right but it wouldn’t give you that color pattern and why would we be using chaff when radar spoofing is all electronic digital stuff? Well I guess it’s to give conspiracy people something to chat about.
Would ‘t the radar returns be messed up for quite some distance down range from the chaff? There wouldn’t necessarily be chaff over that wide swath.
Biggest radar mystery since the Michigan State Police
clocked a willow tree doing 108 MPH back in the 80’s.
“It looks like a giant.....”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpiP_jN1Pv4
There was a maintenance supervisor at the plant I used to work in who would purchase old surplus military junk. One day he gave me a metal box with a a spring timer on it that was filled with aluminum chaff.
It sat on the stereo cabinet in my apartment for a long time until one night I had a party.
Somebody picked it up to examine it and inadvertently set it off. The top flew open and that chaff was ejected all over my living room.........LOL!
“Now its a canyon of hideous, blinking 250 ft. windmills.”
Don’t you hate the instigators?
I’m an old legacy radar guy, mostly FME type so I’m not very familiar with Doppler radar. But I would think the greens, yellows, and reds are a function of target density that the Doppler computer calculates and then adds the corresponding color. I may be totally off on this, so please correct me if I am.
Without getting into too much detail, I’m one of the EW OPFOR guys your crews go up against, and I’ve seen massive chaff clouds on my PPI from C-130’s. Enough chaff to kill my picture of the valley we operate from. It can be enough to screw up our MTI.
I don’t know either but that image sure looks like weather to me - that’s the way it looks on the radar we have on the flight deck. In my reading of WW2 spoofing stuff we were dumping long aluminum strips of the frequency the Germans used. We’re into millimeter or higher digital stuff and spoofing is pretty much all electronic now. I have some friends in the service and we chat about stuff and this came up. To me, it still looks like weather, and a target that large would certainly be noticed. Look at the area it covers.
I haven’t been able to get the link to work so I haven’t seen the picture.
As you can see, it's way to large to be any sort of aircraft.
Yeah.... that ain’t chaff.
Conspiracy people need something to keep them going; a reason for existence.
"... as it passed over the Red Hills Military Operations Area (MOA), the crew requested and received permission from air traffic controllers at Indianapolis Center to drop the chaff. MOAs are specially designated pieces of airspace across the United States that U.S. military units can activate in order to conduct training and other activities."
You’re causing conspiracy folks to have a meltdown.
Assuming they’re keeping tabs on those Russian Blackjacks in Venezuela eh ?
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