These are flight strips -- they go into a stack that help the controller know what planes he is working and usually include the destination, the flight time, the type of aircraft, and a few other things.
it is a flight strip, and it's how they track flights. they do print messages on them, but the main purpose is to track which planes are in a given sector and at what altitude or to sequence takeoffs and landings.
Anyone interested in this issue should read this story from the Drive and absolutely should scroll down and read the updates even if they don't finish the story.
> The NORAD spokeswoman said the normal sequence following the launch was followed: The missile launch was detected, and it was assessed not to be a threat to the continental United States. The standard practice is for FAA to have a constant liaison in the NORAD ops center, therefore would have been aware of the quick assessment.
I presume the "quick assessment" is not an instant assessment, and the FAA rep present may have passed on the "there's a missile and they're assessing right now" to HQ while it was going on.
Meh. It seems fairly clear that once you've got nukes, you're fairly safe from US intervention. Doubly so if close US allies are in range of your missiles.
The difference in how the US treats North Korea versus Iran is pretty clear.
I'm not really worried about Kim wanting to launch a first strike when he has a solid grasp on his regime. I could see a scenario where he is petty and childish and where a coup is launched, he is about to lose control and makes a decision that amounts to "if I can't run this country, then noone can". He does seem to genuinely dislike the United States, so would be a two birds with one stone decision. I don't know how likely it is for that to happen or whether or not he cares about his countrymen. The purges that he ran to consolidate power early on make it seem like he is not averse to violence.
I was a little worried when the sub-heading said "Skying Skying..."
However, made it all the way down to their audio clip. Holy cow that gets totally psychedelic after just a couple of minutes. Such a bit of sample gold!
Knee-jerk "better safe than sorry" decisions often do more harm than good. There was no conceivable threat from a random North Korean missle test to an airplane in Burbank, CA, and that was quickly determined by people who have the responsibility of making such assessments (NORAD). Why then did a random FAA official decide otherwise?
It could be that the planes could interfere with the long range early warning system. Something that you really don't want to happen for a multitude of reasons. A ten minute delay is barely a minor inconvenience, and a good call to make imho even if it's for all for nothing.
> It could be that the planes could interfere with the long range early warning system.
"Interference" is one possible way to call it. Another is "US Military getting ready to blast all objects in the sky with counter-nukes", and airplanes really don't want to be in the crossfire right now.
I don't really know how the US missile-defense system works. I'm imagining that old 1980s arcade game "Missile Command" though...
> US Military getting ready to blast all objects in the sky with counter-nukes.
The missile-defense system work by using SAMs (Surface-to-Air Missiles). Having a nuke counter an ICBM will lead to far worse fallout. While you're correct, the planes don't want to be in that crossfire, the missile targeting system would more than easily account for civilian aircraft and avoid them.
> The missile-defense system work by using SAMs (Surface-to-Air Missiles). Having a nuke counter an ICBM will lead to far worse fallout. While you're correct, the planes don't want to be in that crossfire, the missile targeting system would more than easily account for civilian aircraft and avoid them.
ICBMs travel in excess of Mach 10, and typical SAMs are Mach 1 to Mach 5.
--------
Instead of using a small explosive to bring down an enemy nuke, surely there's an idea to use a bigger counter-nuke? Sure, there's going to be a ton of fallout, but that's still better than losing the entirety of San Francisco.
Its a lot easier to hit an enemy missile with a big-bomb, rather than using a little bomb. IE: load those SAMs with nukes and have at it. Even if you're slower, you got the strength and blast-radius of a nuke and have a better chance of bringing down the enemy ICBM.
------
I don't think its an issue of "airplanes would be hit by a SAM". I think it's seriously the risk of airplanes literally getting caught in the blasts (that were aimed at the enemy missile).
These aren't typical SAMs. They're ABMs. Something like the SM-3[1] has a similar velocity as an incoming ballistic missile. ABM tech tends to rely on hit-to-kill instead of detonating a warhead.
They're talking about nuclear-tipped anti-ballistic missiles; blowing up an incoming nuke with an airburst nuke of your own. We don't have them currently, but both the US and Russia have tinkered with the concept.
Do it high enough up and it's got similar fallout to the atmospheric tests we used to do. Not great, but better than millions dead on the ground.
> They're talking about nuclear-tipped anti-ballistic missiles;
blowing up an incoming nuke with an airburst nuke of your own.
High-altitude airbursts produce essentially no fallout; fallout is from tossing irradiated ground debris into the air from a ground burst or near-ground burst. Other than the missile itself and it's target, there's nothing for a high-altitude airburst to make fallout from.
> We don't have them currently, but both the US and Russia have tinkered with the concept.
Fallout is better than a city blowing up - we used to test nukes in the atmosphere, and while we've recognized that's not great, the calculus changes a bit with a nuke coming to blow up NYC or LA. You're right that we don't have nuclear-tipped anti-ballistic missiles currently, opting for more accurate conventional ABMs, but that's more about the US and Russia trying to reduce their nuclear arsenals.
Fallout worry is not a thing with modern ICBMs and warheads (not the way you're imagining it). By the time the ICBM enters the terminal phase nothing can (currently) stop it. It's just a deployed MIRVed/MARVed warhead, ie. a set of a dozen or more hypersonic glides tipped with nukes and you have barely minutes to do anything even if you could. No, the way you stop a modern ICBM is you shoot it down with a nucler tipped anti-ICBM missile mid flight during its mid flight/coast phase, way before it had a chance to deploy. This basically happens in space and no fallout is going to reach the ground.
Basically you launch a missile that intercepts a high altitude missile and launch an object at it in a 'hit-to-kill'. It's been fairly successful in testing according to the link.
> The missile-defense system work by using SAMs (Surface-to-Air Missiles
SAMs aren't an alternative to nukes because SAMs can be nukes. The (retired) US Nike-Hercules (intended for anti-bomber) and Nike-Zeus (anti-warhead and, at least in testing, also anti-satellite for Zeus B) are examples.
(Note, if you live in the Bay Area there are a whole bunch of decommissioned bases for these missiles around.)
> Having a nuke counter an ICBM will lead to far worse fallout.
Nuclear airbursts that aren't in close proximity to the ground relative to yield have essentially zero fallout (fallout is basically irradiated debris from the ground kicked into the air by the explosion.) It may or may not increase the amount of flash radiation, but that's a shorter-term, smaller area problem. But the US doesn't (at least officially, and I doubt this could be effectively concealed) rely on nuclear air-to-surface defenses any more.
But any nuclear attack has an EMP risk, and I don't think a plane is where you want to be during an EMP. Plus, people on the ground when a threat is confirmed have a better chance of being able to follow an order to shelter than those in the air.
From a civil defense perspective, “ground the planes in the potential target area immediately and unconditionally on launch warning” makes a whole lot of sense.
Signal to noise matters. Radar has an inverse fourth power (vs. distance) return energy. So you are dealing with -really- faint distant returns and much, much stronger close returns.
Getting rid of some of that clutter sounds really nice for performance.
The US does have a modest missile defense system, about the size needed to stop an attack from North Korea. One of the launch sites is Vandenberg, near Santa Barbara, CA. Most recent test launch was in 2021.[1]
Those don't have nuclear warheads; that went out with Nike-Zeus in the 1960s.
> A ten minute delay is barely a minor inconvenience, and a good call to make imho even if it's for all for nothing
Except that argument sounds like an incentive to have a ten minute delay for any potential issue, no matter how little data you have and how unlikely the outcome.
> I'm fine with having a 10-minute flight delay every time a rogue nation fires an experimental ICBM in a desperate attempt to maintain its sovereignty.
Agreed. North Korea is now nuclear-armed. Every single one of those ICBMs could have a nuke on it now.
> If only there were a central agency tasked providing aerospace warning, air sovereignty, and protection for Northern America.
They do exist. Talk to them, or read what they have to say. EDIT: This is the good ol' "Star Wars" missile defense problem, its been discussed for decades. I'm not myself fully up to date with it, but there's a ton of information online from Senate Hearings / House Hearings on whether or not building this missile defense was worthwhile.
They aren't really that confident in the probabilities of success in stopping a nuclear-armed ICBM. They're gonna try but its not like anyone has ever actually shot a nuke at the USA yet. The ultimate test of pragmatism has never happened yet.
It’s not really a good early warning system if regular daily aircraft traffic that’s been around since before radar was invented can interfere with it. If this was the case, the system would be unfieldable.
An ICBM travels at Mach 10 to Mach 20, while your typical SAM travels at Mach 1 to Mach 5. The fact of the matter is: missile-defense is significantly harder than missile-offense. Especially at the ICBM levels.
There's almost no certainty that we can stop an ICBM. We have untested systems and untested warning systems that the Soviet Union never even bothered to test. But now there's a rogue nation trying to play tough guy sitting across the Pacific Ocean with nuclear weapons and an experimental ICBM platform.
If an ICBM gets launched, the USA is probably going to throw everything we got to try to stop the missile. Then we'll probably fail, and the city will get nuked anyway. But we gotta do everything within our power to make the probability of success as high as possible.
-----
San Francisco, Los Angeles, etc. etc. Any of those cities could be lost within a few minutes under these scenarios. If people are saying that this airplane stop-order was over a nuke, I think its actually 100% reasonable to have done these stop-flying orders.
The "secrets" are how good our radar systems are at tracking a Mach 20 object in space. That sort of stuff is classified and no one seems to be speaking about that.
Yes, we know what path it probably will take, but to actually _HIT_ such a target requires extremely precise tracking and positioning.
What we do know, is that they ground the entire West Coast's airplanes when an ICBM from North Korea is launched. My guess is that those radars probably work better when there's fewer airplanes in the sky. Hard to know for sure, the spooks don't seem to be talking about the details. But I'm working backwards here with Occam's razor.
Every other DPRK ICBM test has crashed into the ocean.
This one also crashed into the ocean, but it got further along. In particular, there seems to be confirmations that this DPRK ICBM test did in fact reach Mach 10.
If this is the first ICBM to reach hypersonic speeds and had something that looked like an intercontinental launch cycle, it would make sense to take it seriously.
The Hwasong-12 (EDIT: Hwasong-8 I mean) missile test only reached Mach 3, which is slower than hypersonic.
If this is the first successful hypersonic missile from North Korea, that's big news, and possibly warranting the severe response that our nuclear defense forces (probably) gave to the FAA.
The hysteria displayed both by the FAA and in this thread is kinda shocking. I work with the military in Japan. Every time a North Korean missile flies into/over Japanese territory we get a warning about it...and then go about our business as usual. We can usually see their flight trajectories on our Common Operational Picture. This one was not significantly different from the dozen or so previous incidents. No idea why people in the States shat a brick and grounded civilian aircraft, especially if NORAD didn't concur with such an action.
Because if something bad happened, a bunch of FAA would lose their jobs. When you see very risk adverse decisions like this, it's usually because some person or a group of people don't want to get fired in the off chance something goes wrong.
The cynic in me says it could have been a propaganda move - as in, the authorities knew there wasn't a credible threat, but it suits their narrative to have the media latching on to it. Because the media are guaranteed to have the story grow FUD-cladded arms and legs.
Nations rattling their sabres is just background noise to busy people trying to live their private lives. Grounding my flight for 10 minutes, though? That makes it real and tangible.
I have no earthly idea what “narrative“ you are referring to, or what kind of FUD you expect the media to spread. The story will either just disappear because nothing really happened, or it will be about “overly cautious” vs “better safe than sorry”, as this thread is.
I don't think anyone seriously doubts the possibility that DPRK will some day have missiles which could threaten the US west coast, they're certainly trying.
What we seem to have here is a failsafe, and the right decision. The key word there is "fail", because that's what it looks like. Some internal line of communication or process broken to the extent that somebody somewhere put out an order to ground planes. (or possibly a deliberate live readiness test) You want to fail safe, the cost of briefly inconveniencing aviation is incomparable to the cost of screwing up defenses in the case of a real attack. Failing like this also gets a lot of attention which will motivate people to fix whatever the issues were that lead to it.
I'd just think of it as a test case highlighting a bug. I don't know what great harm could come from it.
I’m not even sure there was a fixable problem; this seems to be something where you want the grounding order near-automatic on a path that doesn't have too much review in the loop and even a cancellation after quick review on a less instant, more certain 9f correctness path. If it is a real attack, delay can be critical, if it's not after the grounding order goes out, a slight delay in cancellation doesn't make a big difference.
Reading into the scant evidence, this would seem to be a call NORAD would make, didn’t in this circumstance, and somebody between the decision maker at NORAD and the person who sends the message to air traffic control made the call because they didn’t have full information, couldn’t get the right information in time, or didn’t have full knowledge of the protocol and got nervous.
> Failing like this also gets a lot of attention which will motivate people to fix whatever the issues were that lead to it.
That's a really fantastic point! What may initially be perceived as government incompetence is _really_ just a self correcting negative social feedback loop! Thanks for the unique perspective on this, have you worked in any of these agencies?
Haha, yeah, that is not at all what happens in a moment like this. Instead, as we are seeing right now, the playbook is to deny, to obfuscate and to delay.
Even if anti missile defense isn’t the reason I still see good reason. You should gain as much control as you can before the event. Putting people on the ground helps put us in control. We may have to send up fighter planes and whatever else and we don’t need to worry about maneuvering around passenger planes.
I view it like a flat tire. If you have a slow leak, you’re mostly in control and can get it refilled and monitor it. If you know the tire is losing air at medium speed, you can navigate to a safer space and potentially to a place to fix the issue. The worst case is a blowout while driving 70+ MPH on a highway with no shoulder while you’re only halfway paying attention to the road. All situations are about how your control is limited and maximizing your actions to get a safe & disruption free remedy. If you’re driving high speed and your low pressure light comes on, you’d be wise to at least pull over and inspect the issue. Not a perfect analogy but you get the gist.
Eh, while one would assume that there are many defense systems which nobody knows about, in the event of an actual attack lots of things would be going into the air in a very short timeframe. Best to do everything to reduce complexity of the situation, you wouldn’t want to see a civilian aircraft get misidentified or an in air collision or some other mistake.
Or that an airplane failing to squawk is shot down because everyone thought the country is under attack, and the airplane had a malfunctioning radio. Similar to the KAL007 situation, a civilian plane shot down by Soviet air defense during a tense moment (also involving a missile test).
Assume Los Angeles International Airport was suddenly unusable due to an attack. How many airplanes in flight would suddenly need to find a replacement place to land with limited fuel available?
DPRK certainly has strategic ICBM's that currently threaten the West Coast. Hwasong-14/KN20 tested in 2017 could do it, and more recent developments are adding payload (so you can mirv) and a bit more range to hit the rest of the US. Once you have enough payloads to overwhelm THAAD, which isn't too difficult considering the ~$1B/interceptor price tag, it's pretty clear that given reasonable numbers of existing DPRK capabilities, they could successfully certainly land a nuke in Anchorage, Seattle, perhaps LA.
They're actually moving their focus from strategic missiles to tactical nuclear missiles now (despite ongoing strategic development). KJU has been discussing his desires for large numbers of tactical nuclear weapons as part of the DPRK strategy, and they're making lots of progress in that direction.
North Korean politics are game-of-thrones style medieval kings and queens. Kim Jong un is the supreme-ruler of North Korea. At a relatively young age of 38-years-old, he barely commands respect of his political apparatus.
Kim Jong-un has killed his brother and uncle in a dramatic show of force to consolidate power. It seems like he's decided that annoying the USA is now to his own political gain.
Kim Jong-un's primary motivation is to perpetuate his myth and legend, to continue to prove to his people that he's a god-given King who deserves to rule over the nation. Much like his father. But any of Kim Jong Un's political rivals can capture the "mandate of heaven" if they prove themselves worthy on the public stage.
-----------
From the perspective of "proving that god / the heavens are on Kim Jong Un's side", pissing off the USA unnecessarily does a good job at that.
And even without the factional struggles and insane personality cults, the DPRK's position is that the US is the real enemy preventing unification with their southern neighbour. For both ideological and strategic reasons, any country wants the capacity be able to threaten their real enemy, not just their immediate neighbour, especially if that neighbour is - according to their political theory - a kindred nation under the yoke of the hated enemy.
Missile threats to the US probably irritate their tacit Chinese allies less than missile threats on the Korean peninsula too...
Because "if you attack us, we'll obliterate San Francisco" is much better insurance policy. And SK has been pursuing missiles for NK decapitation strike for past few years with US blessing. So it's also message for US to keep SK on leash and that US ultimately is culpable for SK behavior.
> Why try to seriously threaten the US mainland, when it’s significantly easier to hold millions of US-allied civilians hostage?
Because if South Korea falls out of US favor for whatever reason (revolution, coup, geo-politics, Trump Jr. becoming god-king-for-life with an allergy to Korean food), the current defensive strategy stops working.
If you want to know how much help an allied civilian can expect in the long run, you could always ask the Kurds in Syria. You'll be betrayed whenever it is politically expedient.
Having ICBMs is much more effective defensive strategy, because it works against any non-insane adversary, in any set of circumstances.
A Groundstop (for NY area) wasn't issued on 9/11 until 9:06, 20 minutes after this event and 3 minutes after the second plane hit.
Flight 93 took off at 08:42, four minutes before the first plane hit the towers. Additionally, it was known well before the groundstop order that Flight 77 had already deviated at 08:54 and turned off its transponder at 08:56.
A "better safe than sorry" groundstop may have saved lives impacted by Flight 77 (Pentagon attack), even more if Flight 93 (PA crash) had been delayed by several minutes more.
I'm sure this has something to do with the calculus.
> Knee-jerk "better safe than sorry" decisions often do more harm than good.
Isn't this kind of a tautological statement? If there's a low probability of high damage, and that high damage ends up not happening, then two things happened. First, a small amount of "harm" happens from the extra caution. Second, it did "no good" since the bad thing didn't happen.
So, by definition it did more harm than good. Which is a good thing in the big picture. To believe otherwise is to basically invalidate any scenario of applying caution to low-probability high-damage scenarios.
A couple of interesting assumptions in that comment.
First is an assumption that the capabilities of the missile being tested are "known" and a follow on assumption that the PRK does not have the capability of flying a missile as far west as Burbank, CA.
Neither of these are very good assumptions to make. To understand why, consider the following;
KP's collaborates with both the Russian Federation and China on weapons development (multiple open sources) and both of those nations have missile technology that can go from anywhere in North Korea to pretty much anywhere in the US.
KP has been telling people they have a working hypersonic ballistic missile (travel time Korea to the west coast at ~ 1hr without going sub-orbital.)
The US and KP are technically still at war (the Korean war stopped with a cease fire, not a treaty) and the US and its allies levy sanctions on them that hurt.
So while in previous tests it was both not widely believed that KP could reach the US and the KP had not said they could reach the US, both of those positions changed. That changed the threat posture from "zero" threat to "some" threat.
Fortunately physics is physics and it's pretty clear after 10 to 15 minutes what a missile is doing and what it might be able to do.
As a result I don't really think this was a "knee jerk" decision, I think it's likely policy going forward until better clarity is available on how rapidly KP's missile technology advances and an effective counter can be put into place.
I'm curious what you think would happen if KP nukes a city or two in the US. I presume we'd nuke them back, but then what? How does the rest of the world react? How would SK and China, in particular react? Surely this is a known plan?
Everyone would look the other way and offer thoughts and prayers. North Korea would be largely vaporized and neither China nor South Korea would prolong the issue and risk total nuclear annihilation of humanity.
There would be significant collateral damage to nuking the KP, including to a close ally. Plus, given the prevailing winds, fallout may even drift west all the way to the west coast of the USA. So perhaps we nuke one of their cities, and then begin a full scale conventional invasion?
And of course during the chaos Russia takes Ukraine, NATO curses and gnashes teeth but the US has KW2 on its hands and does nothing.
That would be the rational choice. But what about the decisions made on that blink of a moment? If where to be an escalation to nuclear I'm afraid there might not be an opportunity for diplomacy.
There are plans, but they are not always coordinated. I wouldn't be surprised if before the US could get troops in the area China invades, asking the US navy to provide cover fire (in large part this politics - China could do it themselves but knows that the US needs to be seen as responding so giving the US navy a target is good for both). China and the US are not on great terms, but China has a lot to lose in this scenario and is in geographical position to respond faster. (South Korea is closer, but North Korea is well set to defend against their invasion so China is my guess).
I have no idea what Russia will do in this scenario. Anything seems possible.
I think it would be suicidal for KP to jump into a full scale "hot war" with the US.
That said, I could easily see them shooting ballistic missiles into the ocean 100 miles off the west coast at random times to cause disruption and chaos in the state that provides the biggest chunk of the US GDP (California).
The FAA and US would have no choice but to react as if it "might" be heading for landfall and unable to "launch on warn" because of the geopolitical consequences of obliterating a chunk of KP when their "harmless test" did no damage at all, would be high.
So in the "perception is everything" game, KP's moves appear to me to been about making themselves look good and the US look bad.
So my non-foreign policy analyst position is that this where I see this going over the next 5 - 10 yrs.
> The US and KP are technically still at war (the Korean war stopped with a cease fire, not a treaty) and the US and its allies levy sanctions on them that hurt.
Technically, I don't think the US and North Korea ever been at war. South Korea and North Korea are technically still at war though, as they signed the treaty with each other, not the US.
NORAD: There's no way our anti-missile and anti-air would hit one of our planes by mistake. We're a professional military!
FAA: Iran had a professional military too. And the Soviets and Russians too, and its happened there.
NORAD: Fuck you.
FAA: We're grounding to keep people safe, the military industrial complex is out of control, dangerous, and a threat to American well being.
I side with the FAA. Military systems are extremely dangerous around civilians and the kool-aid the military drinks in terms of their effectiveness and safety doesn't often mesh with reality. The military runs killing machines and when those machines are active its best to get people out of the way. There are no safe killing machines.
It is worth reviewing the KAL007 incident to understand why you see this kind of reaction. The USSR was doing a missile test, the US was flying a surveillance plane just outside Soviet airspace, and just prior to that the US had been deliberating flying planes directly toward Soviet airspace only to turn them around at the last moment. Reagan had been talking tough and the USSR military leaders thought he might actually order a preemptive strike. Then KAL007 takes off from Alaska with its autopilot incorrectly configured, flies right into Soviet territory, and Soviet air defense had to decide if this unidentified plane was the US military finally being bold enough to fly right into their space. When KAL finally contacting Japanese ATC they were told to ascend, which to the Soviet fight pilot sent to intercept looked just like an evasive maneuver. The plane was shot down with no survivors, killing a member of Congress (just imagine how easily the situation could have escalated from there if Reagan really was as out of control as the Soviets thought).
So yeah, better safe than sorry when you have a tense moment in between two hostile, nuclear-armed nations. I would rather see a bunch of travelers deal with the inconvenience of cascading delays than see some US air defense system shoot a plane out of the sky.
I remember a time when you could just walk into an airport and board a plane. In fact bring along a guest to see you off, they will be told when to depart if they don't have a ticket.
Then along came the first hijackers and you had to go through security and have a valid ticket to board a plane. After 9-11 security ratcheted up even more and the guards became federal employees.
Now if a third class nation is getting to ready to launch a missile all the planes sit until receiving a green light. When does the next hyperloop leave SF for Tokyo?
How is your high speed rail going to get from SF to Tokyo?
Perhaps some sort of tunnel? But it’d still take too long and potentially have too much air resistance … unless, since you already have to resist a huge amount of water pressure, you lowered the pressure to that equivalent to the altitude that airplanes fly at or even higher.
If you wanted to do a non-air and non-boat link your only cost-effective option would be to do surface rail to Alaska and then cross about ~80 kilometers by bridge or tunnel (which is about the same as the Channel Tunnel)
Sure as hell a direct tunnel from San Francisco to Tokyo wouldn't be doable. (The US cannot even finish their California high speed rail project)
Ah yes, surely something that hasn't been built before can built the first time around for thousands of kilometers and have it be a vacuum chamber at the same time and cheaper than the current well used and proven technologies.
In fact, if old movies are to be believed, you could just give your ticket to someone else. Tickets should still be transferable, right now airlines use the pretext of security to say that one shouldn't be able to re-sell their tickets, but I call BS.
I call BS on them not being able to handle it - you would still need to show ID to go through the gate and go through security. But if you can buy a ticket at the counter and board 10 minutes later, why can't you transfer the ticket to someone else up to say an hour before the flight. Whatever security checks they do are likely (near) instant. They use security as the pretext for not doing this, but I am guessing the real reason is that would ruin their overbooking schemes.
who will think of the airline mega-corps and their insanely rich backers that capitalized such a locked-down already-for-profit industry in a country that supports near monopolies on infrastructural services?
Airlines aren't exactly known for fabulous margins. I get your point, and I never feel bad for a corporation, but I think airlines are probably one of the few sectors with a hypercompetitive market, tons of options, and pretty low margins. they have basically 0 monopoly, so they compete very harshly on prices and services. Also, I'm not sure who the insanely rich backers would be considering airlines usually aren't exactly family empires and have pretty mediocre investment returns
US gov requires passenger data, so that is why tickets are named to specific passengers. Of course you could argue that airlines could facilitate still ticket transfers by updating the data (same way they handle cancellation+new reservation) but I can understand that they don't want to deal with that sort of hassle.
> The Secure Flight Passenger Data program (SFPD) is a program of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) designed to enhance the security of air travel. Secure Flight regulations are mandatory for all flights for U.S.-based carriers and flights which are in, out, or overflights for international –based aircraft operators.
> Under Secure Flight regulations all passengers (including minors) must provide Secure Flight Passenger Data (SFPD) at the time of ticketing, or the intent to ticket (i.e. travel vouchers).
In 1990s our office manager would order tickets in her name. Whoever got the short straw would visit the customer using the ticket with that lady's name.
The name check is only about stopping frequent flier awards ticket resale. It is possible to get through TSA without an ID. I have done it a couple times. Both times (pre-'rona) it took maybe ten minutes longer.
There was never a time you could just walk through the airport in my lifetime (1990). There were always security controls. That said, you could bring guests, but even guests went through a security screening.
I know that security existed before the 90s (obviously due to the amount of armed skyjackings and bombings it was too lax). I don’t know when x-rays, magnetometers and other radio imagining was first deployed at airports. But it was there for decades before 9/11.
I went in without any security at all just a few years ago in Alaska through a commercial flight at a fairly big airport (anchorage). As far as I'm aware if your flight is in-state (as mine was) you can just walk right in still. I think carrying weapons is still prohibited, but there's no enforcement of that as long as you aren't out threatening someone.
Believe TSA screening was necessary for interstate flights.
There’s a regional airline near me that services TX, OK, TN, and GA. The first few times I flew on it I checked my handgun. After doing that a couple of times and getting weird looks, I was on a flight where the pilot saw the small, hard-sided case in the cargo area and asked whose it was. I replied that it was mine, and he handed it to me - he said it was small enough that if we hit turbulence it could end up in the cabin and hit someone.
In 1999 when I was flying all the time there were metal detectors, but when they found my pocketknife (not every time!) they just waived me through. At my "home" airport (DIA) I would park the car 15 minutes before flight time and then run to the bridge. (Back then I had clients who would pay for parking in the garage.) There were "controls", but they were very low-stress.
I used to be greeted at the gate by my family when I flew as a kid. This was ~1983. Yes, people put 10 year old kids on flights across the country without a worry.
There was one scary time for me- I visited Germany, and flew on a different flight from the rest of my family (as a 14-year-old) and I didn't udnerstand I was supposed to exit the terminal. It was worrisome because there were guards openly carrying powerful looking rifles. The whole experience made me a better independent traveller when it was time to go to college and then travel for work.
I was like 5 the first time I flew alone, and my family took me to the gate on one side and picked me up from the other gate. You never needed a ticket until 9/11, just a simple security screening. When I was young, I forgot my Cub Scouts pocketknife in my pocket (2 of them actually) and they let me into the gate area with the knives. As long as it was < 2-3 inches for blades, they didn't care. Now we have a whole slew of intelligence agencies slurping up our data, we have hijacker-proof doors on the planes, we have bomb detection devices throughout airports "smelling" the air, etc. but we still need to remove our shoes and coats and everything else from our bags and get felt up by a TSA agent.
There were metal detectors, but you could go anywhere in the airport that normal people could go without a ticket. The security people never asked to see your ticket. It wasn't until you got to the gate that you had to show you had a ticket. So, if you were into planes, you could just go to the airport, go to any place in the terminal and sit down and watch the planes all day long.
Although "Mad Men" isn't a documentary it does show how easy it was to board a plane in the early 60's. It agrees with what the adults said was the reason hijacking was so easy then.
I don't think most young people know how prevalent hijackings were in the past. There were dozens every year peaking in the late 60s and early 70s. In those days, they were usually done for ransom money or some political cause and the end goal was not to kill anyone. 9/11 obviously changed that as it became clear a hijacking threatened the life of everyone onboard as well as people on the ground. Security changes since then have resulted in hijackings almost completely disappearing from passenger flights in the western world. I would personally attribute this more to changes like reinforced cockpit doors rather than the TSA style screenings, but the security changes have brought a real measurable improvement in reducing hijackings.
I don't have exact numbers, but less common than the 70s and more common than today. Like I said, they peaked in the 60s and 70s. While the TSA didn't exist until after 9/11, TSA style screenings were introduced in response to those hijackings. That was at least part of what caused the numbers to drop through the 70s, 80s, and 90s. That is why I'm not willing to completely dismiss those screenings as security theater. Sure, taking off our shoes is almost certainly meaningless from a security perspective. But walking through a metal detector and putting our bags through x-ray machines likely does help. Basically the screenings that still happen for people with TSA Precheck show what security practices are likely the most valuable.
Sure, airport security is annoying. But it was effective in bringing down the rate of hijackings, which are extremely rare in the US these days. 9/11 was over 20 years ago now, and I can't recall any US airliner being hijacked since.
Contrast that to the era before security checks, when 130 American planes were hijacked between 1968 and 1972 [1].
1) Solved is a bold word. Cockpit doors still open and close during flights.
2) If we don’t screen bags and a gun or bomb gets on board, it doesn’t matter wether the door is locked or not, that plane is at the mercy of the terrorist.
But which specific measures are actually effective and which are a waste of time? The 9/11 highjacking was accomplished with box cutters. Also 9/11 transformed highjacking from a major inconvenience to a national threat.
I remember in the mid-90s turning up to check-in 15 minutes before the scheduled departure time of my flight from London to NYC, showing them my passport, the photo fell out of my passport, crew member picked it up and told me to just RUN for the gate. Boarded. All good.
Not only did they stop departures, but I heard at least two aircraft told they had to land.
"I need you to go ahead and land at Van Nuys at this time. Some kind of national security threat's going on and we are not allowing aircraft to maneuver in the area at the moment." https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1480763671164817410
This aircraft had just taken off, and then: "At the moment sir I need you to return to Van Nuys and land. Something's going on and we're not sure exactly what yet but we need you to return back to to Van Nuys and land..." https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1480941345787187206
"As a matter of precaution, the FAA temporarily paused departures at some airports along the West Coast on Monday night. Full operations resumed in less than 15 minutes. The FAA regularly takes precautionary measures. We are reviewing the process around this ground stop as we do after all such events."
The all-caps in this title is a bit much. From Bloomberg:
“The Federal Aviation Administration issues ground stops routinely to ensure airports and high-altitude flight paths remain orderly. They can occur for weather, volcanic eruptions or any number of reasons. On Monday afternoon, for example, the FAA ordered a brief halt to flights in the central region of the U.S. as a result of aircraft volume related to the college football championship game in Indianapolis.”
I think this is a bit different. This was a very sudden, multi-region (4 Air Route Traffic Control Centers: Seattle, Oakland, Los Angeles, Honolulu) ground stop with controllers telling pilots they could not continue maneuvering and had to land because of a national security threat, and maybe they'd be scrambling fighters[1]. I think some of that is just controller speculation, but at the very least they didn't think it was at all routine.
On Sunday, TSA Pre was especially sensitive to everyone passing through it. Small jewelry triggering the metal detectors, high frequency of random screenings, doing swabs over electronics.
Just one data point for one airport at one time period, but it was confusing everyone as their threat assessment was set much higher than normal.
haha thats so dumb I'm never going to write it that way or say it that way outloud
fortunately the point of language is to quickly convey a shared concept so as nobody will be confused I think we're good here
edit: also one of the variants on boarding passes is just TSA PRE without the check, just as your wikipedia article says. so they've created their own colloquialism.
The title is somewhat misleading. A groundstop is far less dramatic than "grounding" all flights (including ones already en-route). Grounding all flights would be akin to what the FAA ordered during the 9/11 attacks.
The comments so far seem pretty negative, but for a pause of (what the article says) of 15 minutes I'd say that sounds like a pretty good call on the FAA's part for what reads like a moment of uncertainty with the risk of being wrong very great?
Personally I'd think 15 minutes of inconvenience would be pretty petty of me to prioritize over protection from a potential national security threat
This is it. Look at how often this happens, recently in Iran and before that in Ukraine. Anti-missile and anti-air systems are extremely dangerous and reckless machines. Civilian flights get blown up all the time and being extra cautious makes a lot of sense.
Me too. Was thinking same thing. Don't want planes getting caught in the crossfire considering we would probably throw a drag net of intercepting missiles at it.
I'm not an expert or even novice on military weapons or defenses, so this response might just be Hollywood talking, but couldn't taking the planes out of the sky allow for a clearer shot of any deflection missiles/anti-air missiles or something like that?
That sounds pretty plausible. Also, how far does the EMP wave from a nuke travel? Would it minimize the potential damage to flying aircraft if they were on the ground compared to in the air? Or would it be a moot point and if in range of the emp, the blast itself would do more damage?
> In July 1962, the US carried out the Starfish Prime test, exploding a 1.44 Mt (6.0 PJ) bomb 400 kilometres (250 mi; 1,300,000 ft) above the mid-Pacific Ocean. This demonstrated that the effects of a high-altitude nuclear explosion were much larger than had been previously calculated. Starfish Prime made those effects known to the public by causing electrical damage in Hawaii, about 1,445 kilometres (898 mi) away from the detonation point, knocking out about 300 streetlights, setting off numerous burglar alarms and damaging a microwave link.
I guess that's the smallest of your worries if you are hit by a nuke.
> I guess that's the smallest of your worries if you are hit by a nuke.
Well.. from what you posted I guess it depends on if you are in the plane or not. It sounds like you could be at a distance where you survive the blast but are impacted by the EMP and it would probably suck to be at 30k feet in a plane that is hit by an EMP.
I don't think an EMP from a ground explosion would be significant. At least for a something 30k feet above it as I believe the pulse to be shaped horizontally and weak. To generate a significant EMP you have to detonate a nuke at high altitude as to cause a secondary EMP due to Earth magnetic field.
Even if a plane is hit by an EMP I believe the engines will keep working and the plane will have backup controls. Unless it's a Boeing of the newer generation where everything is electrical/digital. And even if everything stops working it will keep gliding unless at an odd angle/speed at the moment of the hit. That said loss of instruments and radio would be painful. Components getting damaged depends on the magnitude of the EMP and a weak pulse might cause only transitory malfunctions.
Note: my knowledge on this subject is superficial and I'm probably wrong.
It's not about the risk of your aircraft. It's the risk to your aircraft. In an actual emergency involving airspace violation, anything in the sky becomes a potential threat for interception.
Exactly. If you're potentially activating missile defenses, you probably want all civilian air traffic out of the sky. For their own sake.
Give the timing, uncertainty, countermeasures, and consequences of not intercepting... "Your flight leaves 30 minutes later" is a small price to pay vs "Passenger airliner shot down."
Airliners carry less than 1,000 people. Usually a lot less.
Nukemap says 10kt on downtown LA would result in about 71,000 immediate casualties.
Would you want to be in the air when someone at NORAD has to make a call on something that may or may not be a passenger airliner?
NK does not announce where their missiles are going, and NORAD probably wanted to clear some airspace to better track the missile, especially given that NK has missiles that can reach the west coast. The military also probably wanted to avoid dangerously confusing situations, like a civilian aircraft failing to squawk as expected or even a civilian plane crashing (just imagine what might happen -- NK is launching a missile, and suddenly NORAD is also tracking another object that seems to be an airplane without a transponder heading directly toward the Bay Area or receiving a call that some kind of explosion was just reported in LA following the object rapidly losing altitude...). It is not as if confusion during a tense moment leading to needless death is unprecedented in the history of aviation:
> NORAD probably wanted to clear some airspace to better track the missile
I can't see any way planes in Western US airspace could possibly interfere with tracking an NK launched ICBM, even by clutter, except maybe in the last minutes of the terminal phase of warhead descent at which point any defense (active or civil or both) would already have to have been committed to do any good.
Grounding planes is to mitigate risk to the people on the planes, and maybe to clear lines of fire for anti-missile systems (which is mostly about protecting people who aren't on the planes, but incidentally also protects those on the planes, too.)
Like I said, what if one of those planes had a malfunctioning transponder? It is a somewhat stretched scenario, but the NK military might have gotten bold and decided to shoot a missile all the way to the boundary of US territorial waters or airspace. In the middle of nervously tracking a missile that seems to be headed directly toward the west coast, NORAD suddenly sees another object that looks just like an airplane heading toward LA or SF, but it is not identifying itself. Now NORAD personnel have to take time to figure out if this airplane is just a malfunctioning civilian plane or some kind of NK attack.
Sure, NORAD probably tracked the plane from whatever airport it departed from, but during the missile test they probably want to have their personnel focus every second of their attention on the missile and not on checking some flight path.
Maybe it was because we have a secret Anti-Ballistic Missile system that "throws darts" at inbound missiles and we don't want any planes in the cross fire ?
The radar signature, altitude and speed would be completely different than any civilian aircraft. That was a mach 10 missile. For reference SR-71, the fastest plane that entered service (at least of those we know) has a speed of 3.2+ mach.
> I’m not sure what possible risk there was to our aircraft. Specifically from a missile launch in NK.
NK nuclear armed and, has the estimated ability to hit the West Coast of the US with ICBMs, and is believed to be able to make warheads small enough to mount on its ICBMs now. (The first two have been true for quite a few years now, the last is more recent.)
The threat to people in planes is at least twofold:
One: EMP from a nuclear blast is not a good thing for aircraft.
Two: People on the ground can shelter to mitigate some of the risk from a confirmed incoming attack, people in planes cannot.
Looks like they may have launched a hypersonic missle that reached speeds of ~Mach 10[1], and the US (publicly, at least) seems to be lagging behind China and Russia in Hypersonic R&D - at least as of 2019[2].
How long would it take for a missile traveling at Mach 10 to reach a point where a high-altitude EMP attack[3] would cripple the west coast of the US?
Is that time longer than it would take for aircraft to return to a place where they could land? If NORAD spots a bogey moving that fast, is the rule right now just... everything stops until we understand what's happening?
Would love for someone who knows about hypersonics, NK missle capabilities, EMP attacks, etc. generally to say more.
I'm not an expert, just a rocket enthusiast, but "hypersonic" really just means "near orbital velocities".
There's a lot of noise about admittedly really impressive low-altitude air-breathing scramjets, but - as your articles point out - those are still a long way away. The war hawks like to complain that we're not spending sufficiently many billions on developing futuristic hypersonic scramjet missiles. They point to our lack of a working scramjet as evidence that we're doing poorly. And look! North Korea's launched a hypersonic missile, China's launched hypersonic test missiles, Russia's launching hypersonic missiles; we're behind in the next war and it hasn't even started yet!
But those are just orbital or sub-orbital rockets at 50-100km altitude. Of course they're hypersonic, but that's not really that difficult - just build a big rocket, go up for a while, then turn sideways. We've been doing it since the 50s, tech is good enough now that relatively small companies like Firefly Space are launching small satellites to LEO with Series A fundraising of just $75 million. Tada! Hypersonic! The main point is that everyone has the capability to launch lots of these simple rockets, which can be devastatingly effective. Not as effective as highly steerable reentry vehicles or hypersonic scramjets, but enough that no one wants to be a target.
I’m not sure what possible risk there was to our aircraft. Specifically from a missile launch in NK.
It's not exclusively about the risk of a jet being hit in the air. But you don't want to route a bunch of jets to land in a city that no longer exists.
FWIW, it isn't 15 minutes of inconvenience. It's far, far more due to the traffic propagation. A 15 minute pause can result in hours of delays due to a traffic wave[0], which affects airliner takeoff scheduling as well. FAA definitely knew this and took it into account, which makes me even more curious as to the validity of the threat and what made them issue a ground order.
Flight schedules always have slack built into them, I'm betting 15-20 minutes is probably the upper limit of what would not cause a large waterfall of issues.
I can't count the number of times I've been on a flight where the captain said something like, "Well, we left a little late, but we'll make it up on the way there, and expect to arrive on time."
I've had international flights leave an hour late and still arrive on time.
By default, flights are optimized for cost. Pilots can fly faster and burn more fuel to arrive at a destination (depending on reserve and bingo fuel of course) sooner. The goal is to use the minimum amount of fuel to get somewhere however and incur the most profit per passenger as a result. When you look at it, life really is an engineering problem.
Decades ago, before all of the routes and scheduling got to be more of a mesh than an ideal hub-and-spoke, this was an absolute. But now, being late can cost far more money than what would be spent in fuel.
Now, very often the airlines would rather burn some fuel and keep a plane on time than delay or cancel a dozen connecting flights at the destination.
I was noting the fact that they are able to change the speed of a plane to optimize for the specific key performance indicator they deem the most necessary at the time.
I used to work in IT for delta a touch over a decade ago as a systems engineer.
Yeah, a strong wind could literally cause an average delay of 15 minutes for all flights in a given area. It's not a big deal.
Anyone who knows US aviation knows that its foundation is "safety over time," precisely because it's such a multivariate problem and trying to be overly fixed to a schedule gets people killed.
This was limited to airliner taking off from a few west coast airports. That said it does take a little while for slack to get things back to normal, but no individual should have been inconvenienced by more than 15 minutes.
The words "national ground stop" are quoted a few times in the article. If that terminology got back to various airline dispatchers, it may have been more broad than a few airports.
The original article makes it seem like a very local event from “a regional air traffic control facility” mentioning a few individual conversations with pilots. I guess in theory pilots could have said something to their airlines but that’s not a big window for the airlines to actually do anything.
It's possible that controller may have just misspoken or been fed words from another controller and said 'national' when in fact it was for the west coast centers (ARTCC) only (Los Angeles, Oakland).
It means, the FAA agrees with the GP. Safety is never convenient, it's always a balancing act. For example, simply pulling out your keys (or your phone) to lock or unlock your front door is more of a hassle than leaving it unlocked. But less of a hassle than getting robbed.
Article says a Cessna pilot was told to land. That is not just a little hassle in the name of safetyism, it is a diversion from the flight plan for no rational reason.
From article, '... captures the controller telling the pilot of a Cessna to land ...'.
It's a bigger hassle to the Cessna pilot than going about his business and flight plan, and a smaller hassle than his getting caught in the middle of a jet scramble or other military response perhaps.
Also, it's not necessarily entirely about the pilot's safety/inconvenience tradeoff. The Cessna IS a hassle, for anybody trying to scramble jets or launch an anti-missile interceptor or who-knows-what. The Cessna, on the ground, perhaps with its pilot quietly bitching about his ruined flight plan, is a smaller hassle.
If anything, it served as a great test of that system. But from the sounds of it, NORAD declared this a non-issue and yet a portion of the FAA still proceeded with the shut-down. So whether this was a pass or a fail depends on who has the final authority over shutting down airspace.
It's asymmetrical though right, accidentally not shutting down when it's unclear has a small likelihood of a massive loss of life. Accidentally not shutting down results in some eocnomic loss and lots of delays, but in a real way you know there's seriously limited downside. I don't know how the US is doing right now, but in other countries airlines are running way under capacity at the moment anyway, so they can recover from down time much better than usual.
Doesn't that depend very much on the variables encoded in "inconvenience", "protection" and "potential"?
I mean, I can spend 15 minutes putting on a full ABC suit every time I go outside, and would certainly protect me from some possible national security threats, but the extent of the inconvenience, the limited range of protection, and the very low potential would make that an unnecessarily foolish habit.
In more of a real-life scenario, millions of people have spent the last 20 years wasting way more than 15 minutes standing in line to take off their shoes and get x-rayed every time they fly in an airplane to protect against a "potential national security threat" when the only thing that actually needed to happen was locking the cabin doors while the plane is in flight.
A hostile nation with nuclear weapons launched a missile. If you're going to take precautions, that's approximately when the cost/value proposition starts making sense.
Sure, I don't actually know the threat level here, and you could well be correct that this was an appropriate calibrated response. My only argument is that the US have strayed very far into "inconvenienced" territory (forgetting we had any compunctions about torturing people, spying on everyone in the developed world, attempting to entrap entire communities of people based on their religious affiliation) by using the "it's for national security" excuse. Americans would be well advised to be skeptical each and every time that excuse gets used.
> In more of a real-life scenario, millions of people have spent the last 20 years wasting way more than 15 minutes standing in line to take off their shoes and get x-rayed every time they fly in an airplane to protect against a "potential national security threat" when the only thing that actually needed to happen was locking the cabin doors while the plane is in flight.
Where the unstated goal is to prevent hijackers from turning airplanes into aimable missiles? Yeah, I like your argument, what are the counterpoints?
Option 1: After 9/11 the airlines were desperate to get people to fly again, needed some theater to comfort people (because evidently "still orders of magnitude safer than cars per vehicle miles traveled" wasn't convincing), and this let them offload what security they needed to do onto the federal government.
Given the amount of infrastructure modern air forces require, it doesn't matter if the jet is alive and well in the air if all of the supporting cast is incinerated.
Good point. Although, if there's any chance of these difficult to replace assets surviving you'd probably want to take it. Any local airfield with a strip just barely long enough would do.
Deterrence from opportunistic attacks by other parties is also something that comes to mind, but I'm not sure if that makes any sense in these scenarios.
That's an interesting article. But no fighter-jet will ever be useful at stopping an ICBM once it hits Mach10+.
It seems like the F35 anti-nuke idea is to fly the F35 into enemy territory, and then shoot down the missile _BEFORE_ it reaches those speeds. I don't know what kind of situation would give us advance-warning of a nuclear launch, enough time for F35 to scramble into North Korea (violating the DMZ) and then effectively shooting down an ICBM before it reaches top speed, but... hey... weirder things have happened.
Weird contingency plans are basically the military's job. Maybe the situation will come up. Or maybe that situation is aimed for some other nuclear-armed country with a space program (China, Russia?)
What about something like this rather old https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASM-135_ASAT ? There should be some updates meanwhile. Anyway. Assuming NORAD or similar has the rough ballistic track of the potential intruder, and can thus determine the entry ellipsoid, why wouldn't some jets on air patrol in or around that ellipsoid be capable of intercepting it with an air launched system?
As I understand it in my utter ignorance, you don't have to race with something coming in and down at Mach 10, or more. You just have to be in its way at the right time. Which seems doable, in this case, coming from NK, high over the Pacific.
> AT THE TIME, NORAD had 20 fighters on armed alert throughout the North American continent. Only 14 were in the continental U.S. at seven bases; the rest were in Alaska and Canada. Within 18 hr., 300 fighters would be on alert at 26 locations.
It's not saying they sent them all to Alaska. They're saying of the 20 alert fighters - pretty standard numbers in peacetime - six were in Alaska and Canada.
> Personally I'd think 15 minutes of inconvenience would be pretty petty of me to prioritize over protection from a potential national security threat
I can’t buy into this anymore, it’s the new think of the children. Used and abused. I’d rather live life like a normal human and if I perish, well, I had to die from something.
Realistically, what are the odds that a NK launch could hit US aircraft traffic?
In fact what are the odds that any nation except perhaps Russia could? Could the UK? France? China? I guess they have the technology, but I bet they couldn't deploy it from thousands of miles away. For example, the somewhat heroic story of the UK bombing Port Stanley from from the Ascension Islands on the equator during the onset of the Falklands War ... (yeah, ok that was 1982, but still).
If NK had a sub off the coast of CA, then maybe, just maybe they could shoot down an airliner, although I'm still skeptical they could hit it with something that wasn't a sea launched Buk (i.e. built by Russia).
An unusual ground stop was issued to some pilots for a short period of time following a North American Aerospace Defense Command alert of a launch of a North Korean missile, a US official said Tuesday.
The official says it was not a national ground stop and may have been issued by a regional air traffic control facility.
“No warning was issued by NORAD HQ,” regarding a potential threat to the US, according to Captain Pamela Kunze, the chief NORAD spokesperson
Over alleged (by SK) of mach 10 NK hypersonic test.
Arms Control Wonk think it's MaRV.
NK mostly don't issue NOTAMs for their tests from my understanding. US response seems to imply sufficient new capability that would cause alarm. I don't think there were past groundings on this scale over NK missiles.
250 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 261 ms ] threadhttps://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/tfdm/efs/ -- a program to replace the paper strips with electronic ones.
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/atc_html...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_progress_strip
Whoa
> The NORAD spokeswoman said the normal sequence following the launch was followed: The missile launch was detected, and it was assessed not to be a threat to the continental United States. The standard practice is for FAA to have a constant liaison in the NORAD ops center, therefore would have been aware of the quick assessment.
I presume the "quick assessment" is not an instant assessment, and the FAA rep present may have passed on the "there's a missile and they're assessing right now" to HQ while it was going on.
The difference in how the US treats North Korea versus Iran is pretty clear.
However, made it all the way down to their audio clip. Holy cow that gets totally psychedelic after just a couple of minutes. Such a bit of sample gold!
"Interference" is one possible way to call it. Another is "US Military getting ready to blast all objects in the sky with counter-nukes", and airplanes really don't want to be in the crossfire right now.
I don't really know how the US missile-defense system works. I'm imagining that old 1980s arcade game "Missile Command" though...
The missile-defense system work by using SAMs (Surface-to-Air Missiles). Having a nuke counter an ICBM will lead to far worse fallout. While you're correct, the planes don't want to be in that crossfire, the missile targeting system would more than easily account for civilian aircraft and avoid them.
ICBMs travel in excess of Mach 10, and typical SAMs are Mach 1 to Mach 5.
--------
Instead of using a small explosive to bring down an enemy nuke, surely there's an idea to use a bigger counter-nuke? Sure, there's going to be a ton of fallout, but that's still better than losing the entirety of San Francisco.
Its a lot easier to hit an enemy missile with a big-bomb, rather than using a little bomb. IE: load those SAMs with nukes and have at it. Even if you're slower, you got the strength and blast-radius of a nuke and have a better chance of bringing down the enemy ICBM.
------
I don't think its an issue of "airplanes would be hit by a SAM". I think it's seriously the risk of airplanes literally getting caught in the blasts (that were aimed at the enemy missile).
Yes; Russia protects Moscow with such a system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-135_anti-ballistic_missile_s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-161_Standard_Missile_3
Army - Patriot
Army / Missile Defense Agency - THAAD
Army / Air Force / Missile Defense Agency - Ground-Based Midcourse Defense w/ GMI
Navy - Aegis w/ SM-3 (also, Aegis Ashore)
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-161_Standard_Missile_3
Do it high enough up and it's got similar fallout to the atmospheric tests we used to do. Not great, but better than millions dead on the ground.
High-altitude airbursts produce essentially no fallout; fallout is from tossing irradiated ground debris into the air from a ground burst or near-ground burst. Other than the missile itself and it's target, there's nothing for a high-altitude airburst to make fallout from.
> We don't have them currently, but both the US and Russia have tinkered with the concept.
“Widely deployed”, not “tinkered with”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIR-2_Genie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_Zeus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-135_anti-ballistic_missile_s... (currently active!)
Fallout is better than a city blowing up - we used to test nukes in the atmosphere, and while we've recognized that's not great, the calculus changes a bit with a nuke coming to blow up NYC or LA. You're right that we don't have nuclear-tipped anti-ballistic missiles currently, opting for more accurate conventional ABMs, but that's more about the US and Russia trying to reduce their nuclear arsenals.
The most interesting is Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_High_Altitude_Area_De...
Basically you launch a missile that intercepts a high altitude missile and launch an object at it in a 'hit-to-kill'. It's been fairly successful in testing according to the link.
SAMs aren't an alternative to nukes because SAMs can be nukes. The (retired) US Nike-Hercules (intended for anti-bomber) and Nike-Zeus (anti-warhead and, at least in testing, also anti-satellite for Zeus B) are examples.
(Note, if you live in the Bay Area there are a whole bunch of decommissioned bases for these missiles around.)
> Having a nuke counter an ICBM will lead to far worse fallout.
Nuclear airbursts that aren't in close proximity to the ground relative to yield have essentially zero fallout (fallout is basically irradiated debris from the ground kicked into the air by the explosion.) It may or may not increase the amount of flash radiation, but that's a shorter-term, smaller area problem. But the US doesn't (at least officially, and I doubt this could be effectively concealed) rely on nuclear air-to-surface defenses any more.
But any nuclear attack has an EMP risk, and I don't think a plane is where you want to be during an EMP. Plus, people on the ground when a threat is confirmed have a better chance of being able to follow an order to shelter than those in the air.
From a civil defense perspective, “ground the planes in the potential target area immediately and unconditionally on launch warning” makes a whole lot of sense.
Getting rid of some of that clutter sounds really nice for performance.
Those don't have nuclear warheads; that went out with Nike-Zeus in the 1960s.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI7o5exA0tI
Except that argument sounds like an incentive to have a ten minute delay for any potential issue, no matter how little data you have and how unlikely the outcome.
Agreed. North Korea is now nuclear-armed. Every single one of those ICBMs could have a nuke on it now.
If only there were a central agency tasked providing aerospace warning, air sovereignty, and protection for Northern America.
We could call it something like the "North American Aerospace Defense Command". It could have decades of experience of this stuff!
OTOH perhaps the FAA should just make up stuff as they go.
They do exist. Talk to them, or read what they have to say. EDIT: This is the good ol' "Star Wars" missile defense problem, its been discussed for decades. I'm not myself fully up to date with it, but there's a ton of information online from Senate Hearings / House Hearings on whether or not building this missile defense was worthwhile.
They aren't really that confident in the probabilities of success in stopping a nuclear-armed ICBM. They're gonna try but its not like anyone has ever actually shot a nuke at the USA yet. The ultimate test of pragmatism has never happened yet.
There's almost no certainty that we can stop an ICBM. We have untested systems and untested warning systems that the Soviet Union never even bothered to test. But now there's a rogue nation trying to play tough guy sitting across the Pacific Ocean with nuclear weapons and an experimental ICBM platform.
If an ICBM gets launched, the USA is probably going to throw everything we got to try to stop the missile. Then we'll probably fail, and the city will get nuked anyway. But we gotta do everything within our power to make the probability of success as high as possible.
-----
San Francisco, Los Angeles, etc. etc. Any of those cities could be lost within a few minutes under these scenarios. If people are saying that this airplane stop-order was over a nuke, I think its actually 100% reasonable to have done these stop-flying orders.
These aren’t secrets. They’re well publicized facts that haven’t changed since the 1950s.
Yes, we know what path it probably will take, but to actually _HIT_ such a target requires extremely precise tracking and positioning.
What we do know, is that they ground the entire West Coast's airplanes when an ICBM from North Korea is launched. My guess is that those radars probably work better when there's fewer airplanes in the sky. Hard to know for sure, the spooks don't seem to be talking about the details. But I'm working backwards here with Occam's razor.
This isn’t the first test, yet this is the first temporary grounding. Occam’s Razor suggests someone in the west coast ATC fucked up.
This one also crashed into the ocean, but it got further along. In particular, there seems to be confirmations that this DPRK ICBM test did in fact reach Mach 10.
If this is the first ICBM to reach hypersonic speeds and had something that looked like an intercontinental launch cycle, it would make sense to take it seriously.
*EVERY* ICBM hits hypersonic speeds.
The Hwasong-12 (EDIT: Hwasong-8 I mean) missile test only reached Mach 3, which is slower than hypersonic.
If this is the first successful hypersonic missile from North Korea, that's big news, and possibly warranting the severe response that our nuclear defense forces (probably) gave to the FAA.
Nothing you’ve been asserting makes any sense at all.
https://www.nknews.org/2022/01/north-korea-fires-unidentifie...
For scale: Hawaii is not only ten times as far away, that missile landed in the sea west of japan.
The hysteria displayed both by the FAA and in this thread is kinda shocking. I work with the military in Japan. Every time a North Korean missile flies into/over Japanese territory we get a warning about it...and then go about our business as usual. We can usually see their flight trajectories on our Common Operational Picture. This one was not significantly different from the dozen or so previous incidents. No idea why people in the States shat a brick and grounded civilian aircraft, especially if NORAD didn't concur with such an action.
What we seem to have here is a failsafe, and the right decision. The key word there is "fail", because that's what it looks like. Some internal line of communication or process broken to the extent that somebody somewhere put out an order to ground planes. (or possibly a deliberate live readiness test) You want to fail safe, the cost of briefly inconveniencing aviation is incomparable to the cost of screwing up defenses in the case of a real attack. Failing like this also gets a lot of attention which will motivate people to fix whatever the issues were that lead to it.
I'd just think of it as a test case highlighting a bug. I don't know what great harm could come from it.
That's a really fantastic point! What may initially be perceived as government incompetence is _really_ just a self correcting negative social feedback loop! Thanks for the unique perspective on this, have you worked in any of these agencies?
I view it like a flat tire. If you have a slow leak, you’re mostly in control and can get it refilled and monitor it. If you know the tire is losing air at medium speed, you can navigate to a safer space and potentially to a place to fix the issue. The worst case is a blowout while driving 70+ MPH on a highway with no shoulder while you’re only halfway paying attention to the road. All situations are about how your control is limited and maximizing your actions to get a safe & disruption free remedy. If you’re driving high speed and your low pressure light comes on, you’d be wise to at least pull over and inspect the issue. Not a perfect analogy but you get the gist.
Why try to seriously threaten the US mainland, when it’s significantly easier to hold millions of US-allied civilians hostage?
North Korean politics are game-of-thrones style medieval kings and queens. Kim Jong un is the supreme-ruler of North Korea. At a relatively young age of 38-years-old, he barely commands respect of his political apparatus.
Kim Jong-un has killed his brother and uncle in a dramatic show of force to consolidate power. It seems like he's decided that annoying the USA is now to his own political gain.
Kim Jong-un's primary motivation is to perpetuate his myth and legend, to continue to prove to his people that he's a god-given King who deserves to rule over the nation. Much like his father. But any of Kim Jong Un's political rivals can capture the "mandate of heaven" if they prove themselves worthy on the public stage.
-----------
From the perspective of "proving that god / the heavens are on Kim Jong Un's side", pissing off the USA unnecessarily does a good job at that.
Missile threats to the US probably irritate their tacit Chinese allies less than missile threats on the Korean peninsula too...
Because if South Korea falls out of US favor for whatever reason (revolution, coup, geo-politics, Trump Jr. becoming god-king-for-life with an allergy to Korean food), the current defensive strategy stops working.
If you want to know how much help an allied civilian can expect in the long run, you could always ask the Kurds in Syria. You'll be betrayed whenever it is politically expedient.
Having ICBMs is much more effective defensive strategy, because it works against any non-insane adversary, in any set of circumstances.
A Groundstop (for NY area) wasn't issued on 9/11 until 9:06, 20 minutes after this event and 3 minutes after the second plane hit.
Flight 93 took off at 08:42, four minutes before the first plane hit the towers. Additionally, it was known well before the groundstop order that Flight 77 had already deviated at 08:54 and turned off its transponder at 08:56.
A "better safe than sorry" groundstop may have saved lives impacted by Flight 77 (Pentagon attack), even more if Flight 93 (PA crash) had been delayed by several minutes more.
I'm sure this has something to do with the calculus.
I assume it is more about anti-ballistic missile activity and not wanting a mistake to happen where the US gov't takes down a passenger flight(?)
Isn't this kind of a tautological statement? If there's a low probability of high damage, and that high damage ends up not happening, then two things happened. First, a small amount of "harm" happens from the extra caution. Second, it did "no good" since the bad thing didn't happen.
So, by definition it did more harm than good. Which is a good thing in the big picture. To believe otherwise is to basically invalidate any scenario of applying caution to low-probability high-damage scenarios.
First is an assumption that the capabilities of the missile being tested are "known" and a follow on assumption that the PRK does not have the capability of flying a missile as far west as Burbank, CA.
Neither of these are very good assumptions to make. To understand why, consider the following;
KP's collaborates with both the Russian Federation and China on weapons development (multiple open sources) and both of those nations have missile technology that can go from anywhere in North Korea to pretty much anywhere in the US.
KP has been telling people they have a working hypersonic ballistic missile (travel time Korea to the west coast at ~ 1hr without going sub-orbital.)
The US and KP are technically still at war (the Korean war stopped with a cease fire, not a treaty) and the US and its allies levy sanctions on them that hurt.
So while in previous tests it was both not widely believed that KP could reach the US and the KP had not said they could reach the US, both of those positions changed. That changed the threat posture from "zero" threat to "some" threat.
Fortunately physics is physics and it's pretty clear after 10 to 15 minutes what a missile is doing and what it might be able to do.
As a result I don't really think this was a "knee jerk" decision, I think it's likely policy going forward until better clarity is available on how rapidly KP's missile technology advances and an effective counter can be put into place.
And of course during the chaos Russia takes Ukraine, NATO curses and gnashes teeth but the US has KW2 on its hands and does nothing.
I have no idea what Russia will do in this scenario. Anything seems possible.
That said, I could easily see them shooting ballistic missiles into the ocean 100 miles off the west coast at random times to cause disruption and chaos in the state that provides the biggest chunk of the US GDP (California).
The FAA and US would have no choice but to react as if it "might" be heading for landfall and unable to "launch on warn" because of the geopolitical consequences of obliterating a chunk of KP when their "harmless test" did no damage at all, would be high.
So in the "perception is everything" game, KP's moves appear to me to been about making themselves look good and the US look bad.
So my non-foreign policy analyst position is that this where I see this going over the next 5 - 10 yrs.
Technically, I don't think the US and North Korea ever been at war. South Korea and North Korea are technically still at war though, as they signed the treaty with each other, not the US.
FAA: Iran had a professional military too. And the Soviets and Russians too, and its happened there.
NORAD: Fuck you.
FAA: We're grounding to keep people safe, the military industrial complex is out of control, dangerous, and a threat to American well being.
I side with the FAA. Military systems are extremely dangerous around civilians and the kool-aid the military drinks in terms of their effectiveness and safety doesn't often mesh with reality. The military runs killing machines and when those machines are active its best to get people out of the way. There are no safe killing machines.
So yeah, better safe than sorry when you have a tense moment in between two hostile, nuclear-armed nations. I would rather see a bunch of travelers deal with the inconvenience of cascading delays than see some US air defense system shoot a plane out of the sky.
On second thought, I'm not sure I do.
Then along came the first hijackers and you had to go through security and have a valid ticket to board a plane. After 9-11 security ratcheted up even more and the guards became federal employees.
Now if a third class nation is getting to ready to launch a missile all the planes sit until receiving a green light. When does the next hyperloop leave SF for Tokyo?
Never, the whole world has been building more efficient and cost-effective transportation such as high speed rail.
Some details by Adam Something on the technology itself: "The HYPERLOOP Will Never Work, And Here's Why" < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQJgFh_e01g >
Perhaps some sort of tunnel? But it’d still take too long and potentially have too much air resistance … unless, since you already have to resist a huge amount of water pressure, you lowered the pressure to that equivalent to the altitude that airplanes fly at or even higher.
…Oh no.
If you wanted to do a non-air and non-boat link your only cost-effective option would be to do surface rail to Alaska and then cross about ~80 kilometers by bridge or tunnel (which is about the same as the Channel Tunnel)
Sure as hell a direct tunnel from San Francisco to Tokyo wouldn't be doable. (The US cannot even finish their California high speed rail project)
who will think of the airline mega-corps and their insanely rich backers that capitalized such a locked-down already-for-profit industry in a country that supports near monopolies on infrastructural services?
they're the ones I worry about most.
https://pro.delta.com/content/agency/us/en/policy-library/go...
> The Secure Flight Passenger Data program (SFPD) is a program of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) designed to enhance the security of air travel. Secure Flight regulations are mandatory for all flights for U.S.-based carriers and flights which are in, out, or overflights for international –based aircraft operators.
> Under Secure Flight regulations all passengers (including minors) must provide Secure Flight Passenger Data (SFPD) at the time of ticketing, or the intent to ticket (i.e. travel vouchers).
APIS is another similar requirement of delivering actual passenger manifests of flights: https://pro.delta.com/content/agency/us/en/policy-library/go...
And there are probably a multitude of other regulations, especially for international flights
The name check is only about stopping frequent flier awards ticket resale. It is possible to get through TSA without an ID. I have done it a couple times. Both times (pre-'rona) it took maybe ten minutes longer.
Believe TSA screening was necessary for interstate flights.
There’s a regional airline near me that services TX, OK, TN, and GA. The first few times I flew on it I checked my handgun. After doing that a couple of times and getting weird looks, I was on a flight where the pilot saw the small, hard-sided case in the cargo area and asked whose it was. I replied that it was mine, and he handed it to me - he said it was small enough that if we hit turbulence it could end up in the cabin and hit someone.
There was one scary time for me- I visited Germany, and flew on a different flight from the rest of my family (as a 14-year-old) and I didn't udnerstand I was supposed to exit the terminal. It was worrisome because there were guards openly carrying powerful looking rifles. The whole experience made me a better independent traveller when it was time to go to college and then travel for work.
Think about all the things we could do with that money instead.
I don't think most young people know how prevalent hijackings were in the past. There were dozens every year peaking in the late 60s and early 70s. In those days, they were usually done for ransom money or some political cause and the end goal was not to kill anyone. 9/11 obviously changed that as it became clear a hijacking threatened the life of everyone onboard as well as people on the ground. Security changes since then have resulted in hijackings almost completely disappearing from passenger flights in the western world. I would personally attribute this more to changes like reinforced cockpit doors rather than the TSA style screenings, but the security changes have brought a real measurable improvement in reducing hijackings.
Contrast that to the era before security checks, when 130 American planes were hijacked between 1968 and 1972 [1].
[1] https://www.wired.com/2013/06/love-and-terror-in-the-golden-...
2) If we don’t screen bags and a gun or bomb gets on board, it doesn’t matter wether the door is locked or not, that plane is at the mercy of the terrorist.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525
"I need you to go ahead and land at Van Nuys at this time. Some kind of national security threat's going on and we are not allowing aircraft to maneuver in the area at the moment." https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1480763671164817410
This aircraft had just taken off, and then: "At the moment sir I need you to return to Van Nuys and land. Something's going on and we're not sure exactly what yet but we need you to return back to to Van Nuys and land..." https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1480941345787187206
"As a matter of precaution, the FAA temporarily paused departures at some airports along the West Coast on Monday night. Full operations resumed in less than 15 minutes. The FAA regularly takes precautionary measures. We are reviewing the process around this ground stop as we do after all such events."
Also on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ATC/comments/s0xbvu/well_that_was_w...
And TWZ: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43832/mystery-surround...
“The Federal Aviation Administration issues ground stops routinely to ensure airports and high-altitude flight paths remain orderly. They can occur for weather, volcanic eruptions or any number of reasons. On Monday afternoon, for example, the FAA ordered a brief halt to flights in the central region of the U.S. as a result of aircraft volume related to the college football championship game in Indianapolis.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-11/flights-a...
[1] https://twitter.com/thenewarea51/status/1480982996337496067
Just one data point for one airport at one time period, but it was confusing everyone as their threat assessment was set much higher than normal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSA_PreCheck#/media/File:TSA_P...
fortunately the point of language is to quickly convey a shared concept so as nobody will be confused I think we're good here
edit: also one of the variants on boarding passes is just TSA PRE without the check, just as your wikipedia article says. so they've created their own colloquialism.
Personally I'd think 15 minutes of inconvenience would be pretty petty of me to prioritize over protection from a potential national security threat
I’m not saying there are no risks, but I can’t think of any.
I'm not an expert in any of those things, but that's the best I can come up with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17
I guess that's the smallest of your worries if you are hit by a nuke.
Well.. from what you posted I guess it depends on if you are in the plane or not. It sounds like you could be at a distance where you survive the blast but are impacted by the EMP and it would probably suck to be at 30k feet in a plane that is hit by an EMP.
Even if a plane is hit by an EMP I believe the engines will keep working and the plane will have backup controls. Unless it's a Boeing of the newer generation where everything is electrical/digital. And even if everything stops working it will keep gliding unless at an odd angle/speed at the moment of the hit. That said loss of instruments and radio would be painful. Components getting damaged depends on the magnitude of the EMP and a weak pulse might cause only transitory malfunctions.
Note: my knowledge on this subject is superficial and I'm probably wrong.
Give the timing, uncertainty, countermeasures, and consequences of not intercepting... "Your flight leaves 30 minutes later" is a small price to pay vs "Passenger airliner shot down."
Airliners carry less than 1,000 people. Usually a lot less.
Nukemap says 10kt on downtown LA would result in about 71,000 immediate casualties.
Would you want to be in the air when someone at NORAD has to make a call on something that may or may not be a passenger airliner?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007
I can't see any way planes in Western US airspace could possibly interfere with tracking an NK launched ICBM, even by clutter, except maybe in the last minutes of the terminal phase of warhead descent at which point any defense (active or civil or both) would already have to have been committed to do any good.
Grounding planes is to mitigate risk to the people on the planes, and maybe to clear lines of fire for anti-missile systems (which is mostly about protecting people who aren't on the planes, but incidentally also protects those on the planes, too.)
Sure, NORAD probably tracked the plane from whatever airport it departed from, but during the missile test they probably want to have their personnel focus every second of their attention on the missile and not on checking some flight path.
But NORAD said they didn't ask for it:
The official says it was not a national ground stop and may have been issued by a regional air traffic control facility.
“No warning was issued by NORAD HQ,” regarding a potential threat to the US, according to Captain Pamela Kunze, the chief NORAD spokesperson.
NK nuclear armed and, has the estimated ability to hit the West Coast of the US with ICBMs, and is believed to be able to make warheads small enough to mount on its ICBMs now. (The first two have been true for quite a few years now, the last is more recent.)
The threat to people in planes is at least twofold:
One: EMP from a nuclear blast is not a good thing for aircraft.
Two: People on the ground can shelter to mitigate some of the risk from a confirmed incoming attack, people in planes cannot.
Looks like they may have launched a hypersonic missle that reached speeds of ~Mach 10[1], and the US (publicly, at least) seems to be lagging behind China and Russia in Hypersonic R&D - at least as of 2019[2].
How long would it take for a missile traveling at Mach 10 to reach a point where a high-altitude EMP attack[3] would cripple the west coast of the US?
Is that time longer than it would take for aircraft to return to a place where they could land? If NORAD spots a bogey moving that fast, is the rule right now just... everything stops until we understand what's happening?
Would love for someone who knows about hypersonics, NK missle capabilities, EMP attacks, etc. generally to say more.
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/nkorea-launches-p...
[2] - https://www.defensenews.com/naval/the-drift/2019/11/15/dont-...
[3] - https://spectrum.ieee.org/one-atmospheric-nuclear-explosion-...
There's a lot of noise about admittedly really impressive low-altitude air-breathing scramjets, but - as your articles point out - those are still a long way away. The war hawks like to complain that we're not spending sufficiently many billions on developing futuristic hypersonic scramjet missiles. They point to our lack of a working scramjet as evidence that we're doing poorly. And look! North Korea's launched a hypersonic missile, China's launched hypersonic test missiles, Russia's launching hypersonic missiles; we're behind in the next war and it hasn't even started yet!
But those are just orbital or sub-orbital rockets at 50-100km altitude. Of course they're hypersonic, but that's not really that difficult - just build a big rocket, go up for a while, then turn sideways. We've been doing it since the 50s, tech is good enough now that relatively small companies like Firefly Space are launching small satellites to LEO with Series A fundraising of just $75 million. Tada! Hypersonic! The main point is that everyone has the capability to launch lots of these simple rockets, which can be devastatingly effective. Not as effective as highly steerable reentry vehicles or hypersonic scramjets, but enough that no one wants to be a target.
It's not exclusively about the risk of a jet being hit in the air. But you don't want to route a bunch of jets to land in a city that no longer exists.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_wave
I can't count the number of times I've been on a flight where the captain said something like, "Well, we left a little late, but we'll make it up on the way there, and expect to arrive on time."
I've had international flights leave an hour late and still arrive on time.
Decades ago, before all of the routes and scheduling got to be more of a mesh than an ideal hub-and-spoke, this was an absolute. But now, being late can cost far more money than what would be spent in fuel.
Now, very often the airlines would rather burn some fuel and keep a plane on time than delay or cancel a dozen connecting flights at the destination.
I used to work in IT for delta a touch over a decade ago as a systems engineer.
Anyone who knows US aviation knows that its foundation is "safety over time," precisely because it's such a multivariate problem and trying to be overly fixed to a schedule gets people killed.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/11/business/faa-ground-stop-nora...
From article, '... captures the controller telling the pilot of a Cessna to land ...'.
Also, it's not necessarily entirely about the pilot's safety/inconvenience tradeoff. The Cessna IS a hassle, for anybody trying to scramble jets or launch an anti-missile interceptor or who-knows-what. The Cessna, on the ground, perhaps with its pilot quietly bitching about his ruined flight plan, is a smaller hassle.
Anything "can" happen; but did it?
I mean, I can spend 15 minutes putting on a full ABC suit every time I go outside, and would certainly protect me from some possible national security threats, but the extent of the inconvenience, the limited range of protection, and the very low potential would make that an unnecessarily foolish habit.
In more of a real-life scenario, millions of people have spent the last 20 years wasting way more than 15 minutes standing in line to take off their shoes and get x-rayed every time they fly in an airplane to protect against a "potential national security threat" when the only thing that actually needed to happen was locking the cabin doors while the plane is in flight.
The Karens waving their arms about safety seem addicted to their fear-based adrenaline rush.
Where the unstated goal is to prevent hijackers from turning airplanes into aimable missiles? Yeah, I like your argument, what are the counterpoints?
Presumably even that would work out okay as long as we haven't simultaneously sent hundreds of fighter jets on a training mission in Alaska with only 14 remaining to defend CONUS http://web.archive.org/web/20020917072642/http://www.aviatio...
Deterrence from opportunistic attacks by other parties is also something that comes to mind, but I'm not sure if that makes any sense in these scenarios.
https://futurism.com/military-f35-nuclear-missiles
It seems like the F35 anti-nuke idea is to fly the F35 into enemy territory, and then shoot down the missile _BEFORE_ it reaches those speeds. I don't know what kind of situation would give us advance-warning of a nuclear launch, enough time for F35 to scramble into North Korea (violating the DMZ) and then effectively shooting down an ICBM before it reaches top speed, but... hey... weirder things have happened.
Weird contingency plans are basically the military's job. Maybe the situation will come up. Or maybe that situation is aimed for some other nuclear-armed country with a space program (China, Russia?)
edit: Or even from the sea, like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-161_Standard_Missile_3
As I understand it in my utter ignorance, you don't have to race with something coming in and down at Mach 10, or more. You just have to be in its way at the right time. Which seems doable, in this case, coming from NK, high over the Pacific.
> AT THE TIME, NORAD had 20 fighters on armed alert throughout the North American continent. Only 14 were in the continental U.S. at seven bases; the rest were in Alaska and Canada. Within 18 hr., 300 fighters would be on alert at 26 locations.
It's not saying they sent them all to Alaska. They're saying of the 20 alert fighters - pretty standard numbers in peacetime - six were in Alaska and Canada.
I can’t buy into this anymore, it’s the new think of the children. Used and abused. I’d rather live life like a normal human and if I perish, well, I had to die from something.
In fact what are the odds that any nation except perhaps Russia could? Could the UK? France? China? I guess they have the technology, but I bet they couldn't deploy it from thousands of miles away. For example, the somewhat heroic story of the UK bombing Port Stanley from from the Ascension Islands on the equator during the onset of the Falklands War ... (yeah, ok that was 1982, but still).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Black_Buck
If NK had a sub off the coast of CA, then maybe, just maybe they could shoot down an airliner, although I'm still skeptical they could hit it with something that wasn't a sea launched Buk (i.e. built by Russia).
The official says it was not a national ground stop and may have been issued by a regional air traffic control facility.
“No warning was issued by NORAD HQ,” regarding a potential threat to the US, according to Captain Pamela Kunze, the chief NORAD spokesperson
I'm confused. Did NORAD do it or not?
It also says "Other West Coast airports contacted by CNN said they were unaware of the order."
NK mostly don't issue NOTAMs for their tests from my understanding. US response seems to imply sufficient new capability that would cause alarm. I don't think there were past groundings on this scale over NK missiles.
Doesn't seem to be ALL planes