What, an airplane?
A single light airplane flying low and slow? No, it wasn’t.
And someone just recently landed a microlight on the Whitehouse lawn, so its not just the Russians who’ve been embarrassed by a comedian pulling a stunt in an aircraft.
Whoops, sorry, was away for quite some time and didn’t see this thread again for a while.
The problem in 1985 is that the defense systems detected Rust, but nobody acted on it. A couple of times, fighters were denied permission to check him out. At another point, he was going through an area where the controller in charge of the radar had marked all aerial traffic as “friendly”. Rust was also lucky in that in an occassion the radar operator confused him with a helicopter, and didn’t bother with him because there were other helicopters going around that particular patch of airspace – he thought Rust was one of the group of helicopters.
It was not so much a problem of equipment failure, but of repeated human error. I guess I should not have said “improved” (the air-defense systems), but “improved” (the training of the operators in order to minimize this kind of oversight).
I guess what I wrote came across as sarcastic, but that was not my intention.
Will be interesting to see if they build “Monkey Models” for export.
To me that is number 3 on the list.
- Does it actually have the capabilities that are stated in the propaganda?
- Can they afford to build them in meaningful numbers?