If they can’t dodge airliners, how can they dodge SAMs?
I assume this is partly why it seems to be something like standard practice to have the tankers operate with their transponders on, while the planes they’re accompanying do not? Particularly when they’re going to be accompanying them like a mother duck and they’re functionally a single object. You can see some pictures of that here: https://x.com/TheAviationist/status/1936026941821251635
(I leave it to one of our resident pilots to say if the explicit rules are different when overflying the continental US; there have definitely been incidents before involving military aircraft operating without transponders)
But it’s also, of course, a show of force. The US has been moving significant quantities of materiel around lately. Or, at least, that would be the assumption—a C-17 has a payload capacity of 77 metric tons, and the C-5M has a capacity of nearly 128 tons, and there have regularly been at least a half-dozen planes in transit over the last few days. Maybe they’re empty, but Prince Sultan Airbase has picked up at least 20 tankers and 40 fighters.
It’s also a decent bet that the specific airplanes at DG need to come home every so often for more detailed maintenance. So e.g. they send 6 fresh ones down then a week later send the 6 old ones back to Missouri.
The result is no durable net increase in the number of planes at DG. We won’t know until later if this movement is a reinforcement, or a simple trade-out. Nor can we particularly trust what the current administration first says in public about what’s going on.
As to transponders and formations.
Typically in a formation only one airplane is transponding. Because the whole group is treated as a single entity for ATC purposes. Which leads to the question of “what’s a formation?” For this usage of the term it’s a group of airplanes flying in visual proximity to each other. So within a mile or so.
A bunch of bombers and tankers spread out over WAG 30 miles of sky are a single movement from the military POV but are (usually) not a single entity for ATC purposes. So more of the planes will be transponding. An individual bomber/tanker pair (or triplet) would have the lead plane, typically a tanker, transponding and performing all ATC interaction on behalf of its trailing wingmen.
In national airspace under radar control there’s quite a little dance for ATC to send two independent airplanes or formations safely close enough together to find one another. Then once the two groups report they’re both ready to commence formation ops, the lead plane/group assumes ATC interaction, the following plane(s)/groups(s) quit transponding and disappear from ATC’s list of stuff to worry about. The Google term is MARSA: Military Assumes Responsibility for Separation of Aircraft. IOW: Once the planes declare “MARSA”, if they crunch one later that’s all on DoD, not on ATC.
In international airspace there is some manner of ATC nearly everywhere, but it’s a cooperative civil matter, and no government has force of law to demand compliance. Which means the militaries of the world can play nice with that system or can ignore it as they choose. Routine logistics ops they’ll generally play along with the civilians. But for more “interesting” work, there’s a concept called “Due Regard”.
We used to use that a lot in one of my jobs. We’d file a flight plan straight out to sea 50 miles, then the next entry on the flight plane was “due regard”. With no destination after that. Meaning at that spot 50 miles out we just disappeared into the vastness of the sky over the sea. From then on we were no ATC’s problem. We were totally on our own.
Our responsibility thereafter was to use “due regard” care to avoid civilian airplanes. Which generally amounted to using altitudes they mostly didn’t and avoiding published routes. And although we weren’t transponding, we used the tools we had, which depending on the plane may have been airborne search radar or just plain old eyeballs, to avoid crunching anyone. In later years when TCAS became commonplace, it became possible to monitor for nearby transponders without transmitting yourself. You’d see them on your TCAS display, but they would not see you.
Eventually some hours later we’d pop up on someone else’s radar someplace else and say “Hi, we’re here, umpteen miles out to sea. We’d like to join routine ATC ops from here and continue on route XYZ to land at ABC”. They’d put that into their computer, issue a transponder code, we’d start broadcasting it, and we’d then begun acting like a routine civil flight in the same airspace as everybody else on our way to where we would land.
Some details have doubtless changed since my era as more airspace is more controlled worldwide. And as tracking tech like ADS-B has expanded beyond just radars and transponders. But it’s still the case that there are organized procedural carve-outs to let militaries (friendly and otherwise) skulk about in the international skies talking to no one.
Fun thing about stealth aircraft: WWII era radar with long wavelengths can detect them just fine. But those radars don’t have a fine enough resolution to provide missile guidance. It can you tell you something is there, but not enough to say exactly where or really know how big it is.
It still seems like a bad idea to announce to the world where your expensive stealth bombers are.
Ehhh, a satellite will be by in a few hours and let everyone know, anyway. I knew myself that they weren’t present at Diego Garcia a few days ago.
They’re flying to a place that already has them. Or at least had them.
Except for round-trip ordnance delivery, there’s only a handful of places on earth USAF ever wants to take them. Whiteman in Missouri, Anderson on Guam, and Diego Garcia are all the ones I know of off top of my head. There might be 1 or maaybe 2 more places. But not 5 or 10.
Thanks, that’s interesting.
Near as I can tell Diego Garcia is well out of the range of any missile Iran has. I think their longest range missiles can go around 1500 miles. Diego Garcia is roughly 2500 miles from them (but well within B2 bomber range).
Nice one.
True, but Iran does have boats. It doesn’t take a really large missile to make a plane useless. On the other hand, I think that they’d have a devil of a time getting their boats near enough to Diego Garcia to make them effective launch platforms.
The U.S. Navy has a carrier strike group operating in the Arabian Sea.
Nothing that floats from Iran is getting anywhere near Diego Garcia. If something tries, it will no longer be floating.
They do have drones, however, which have a range around halfway to Diego Garcia. If those drones have a longer range than what I saw through casual searching, or if they can get them closer via boats, they could strike at them that way.
Iran has subs like the Fateh that can launch the Jask cruise missile. They could pop one off within range but would probably lose the missile and the sub to USN countermeasures.
Subs are not invisible. I’m sure there’s a picket line of USN submarines currently deployed in the Arabian Sea to prevent anything from sneaking through.
The rocket waves from Iran seem to have slowed down even further. The IDF has said they’ve destroyed over 200 launchers, which should be a major bottleneck for Iran’s war effort. They are continuing the use of cluster munitions against city centers.
Israeli airstrikes continue in Iran, both on their nuclear program and their military.
There are signs that Israel will not wait as long as two weeks for a strike on Fordow, with or without American. I saw this reported in Hebrew, but apparently it’s also in Reuters.
From Reuters:
Exclusive: Israel seeks swift action on Iran, sources say, with a split U.S. administration -
It will be funny, in a tragic way, if Israel fails to ensure all of Iran’s nuclear sites are destroyed because they made the mistake of trusting Donald Trump.
NM…deleted…what I wrote did not conform to a breaking news thread.
Everywhere in the world is within B2 range, with enough midair refuelings. But it makes it a lot easier if your base is relatively close.
Remember, the US is not yet actually at war with Iran. Even if they managed to destroy all of the B2s currently at Diego Garcia, it would mean that we now were at war, which wouldn’t end well for them.