An Awacs orbiting somewhere over the Continental US detects a huge object in space , thats not a natural body. Some private (specialist) watching the radar scope , passes it on to his supervisor and so on , until it reaches the President, if only to tell him that something has been spotted and more information to follow.
How may tiers would it take before it reached POTUS
Declan
There aren’t any privates (or specialists) in the US Air Force, which operates AWACS aircraft (I’m not sure if the Navy operates any, but there definitely aren’t any privates in that branch.) Airplanes also don’t usually orbit the earth.
It’s also pretty unlikely that a Airman (the Air Force equivalent Army private) would be on an AWACS aircraft to begin with. The pilot and navigation crew would almost certainly all be officers, and the highly specialized technicians would be officers or NCOs.
As for how information gets passed up the chain of command, the details vary by unit, the type of situation, and various regulations, and the exact procedures may be classified.
Your average AWACS unit probably (I’m guessing) reports to a component of the US Northern Command. The commanding officers of all the regional combatant commands report directly to the Secretary of Defense, who can get in touch with the President fairly easily.
As for how quickly the information would pass from the aircraft crew to the NORTHCOM commander to the SecDef to the President and how many intermediaries would be skipped or included, who knows.
Without getting specific, since there are security details to worry about, I’ll just say that there are procedures in place so that there are a minimum of wickets to pass through. We’re in the modern age, so it would seem logical that we would have instituted a method to transfer urgent information along without every Tom, Dick, and Harry in the chain of command having to pick up the phone and pass along the gouge.
Might be possible to be an E4 and fly on an AWACS. In the Air Force, an E4 is a Senior Airman, which typically takes a few years to earn even for those of us who put on our A1C (E3) stripes straight out of Basic Training. It’s a few more years from Senior Airman to Staff Sergeant, our lowest NCO rank (I was told by an instructor in Basic that, if you totally kick ass, you can make Staff Sergeant in about 5 years, which is longer than an entire 4 year enlistment for a lot of people.
It’s worth mentioning that, IIRC, the Air Force is the only branch which does not have any NCOs at E4 (Navy has Petty Officers, Marines and Army has Corporals, although not all E4s in the Army are Corporals). We are also the only branch, IIRC, that does not have Warrant Officers. I’ve even seen a Senior Airman who was an instructor in Basic Training, a billet normally reserved for Staff and Technical Sergeants.
Does the Senior airman report directly to the mission commander on the E3, or is there a controller between the two , that gets the report first.
Declan
I can’t speak for the E3, but on every other multi-crew aircraft I’ve been on, there are several channels of ICS (integrated comms system), one of which goes out to the whole plane–everyone hears it. If I’m the airman that lands on the motherlode of intel nuggets (e.g., End Of The World Nigh), I get on that net and say “break break*, blah blah blah,” and the mission commander will hear that (as will everyone else on the plane) and deal with it accordingly.
*“break break” is commonly used to break into idle chit chat or anything not as important as whatever urgent news has caused you to interrupt everything else. You hear that, and you STFU because whatever follows it will be pretty dang important–usually safety-related in an aircraft.
Thanks flyboy, this was about a story that I am dabbling in , I used the Sentry as the a/c , but its actually the variant with that big telescope, as I doubt the awacs normally monitor space side traffic.
Basically the a/c would have been mapping orbital debris patterns for NASA and Airforce space programs. I think thats done by ground side radars and telescopes ,but I wanted a deux a machina to have the plane do it.
Declan