You are usually given a nickname by your squadron mates. “Maverick” was not at all complimentary.
Tell that to James Garner.
The flying Navy was (is?) big on nicknames. Which names are bestowed on fliers by their peers & superiors early in their careers and are by and large not complimentary. Often they commemorate some newbie screwup. Historically those nicknames were termed “callsigns”, but that was just slang terminology. I understand that sometimes on some radios some USN types use their nicknames as radio calls too. But any flight mission has an assigned callsign from the Big Book which has nothing to do with the people performing that mission.
In USAF in my era, nicknames for flight crewmen were not as universal a thing. Some folks had them, many more did not. And a personal nickname would never be used seriously over a radio. In the tactical community, each squadron was issued a list of a few simple distinct east-to-say words for use as their radio callsigns. To which word more or less sequential numbers would be added for each formation / mission and for each member of that formation / mission.
Between the words and the numbers you could make up far more unique identities / callsigns you could fly today. And you could / would reuse them all tomorrow for different people flying different jets on different missions to accomplish different tasks.
Just say “Star Wars style”.
When trying to sell Star Wars, there was film of WWII style dogfights. Perhaps that’s where the “Blue Leader” stuff came from.
Yeah. The space battle scenes and radio chatter in the original Star Wars movie reminded me a lot more of WWII movies than anything that was then current USAF practice.
Which I think was quite deliberate. Lucas was making an epic that touched on tropes of Hollywood Westerns & WWII movies of his own youth just a few years before mine.
There’s SIGINT/ELINT value in “watching the watcher.” I did something similar to this overseas using radio-direction finding intelligence to note key observation points (where cellphones & radios were used) along routes frequently hit by IEDs. Based on the intel, a few days prior to a major convoy, security teams would sweep and secure certain ridges and hills, taking away the Taliban’s ability to see, report on, and target our people.
The point is, given enough warning, we can turn off or reduce our transmissions under/near the balloon’s path, and we can listen to both the structure and content of any telemetry or transmissions from this ‘weather balloon.’ If we can find out what the enemy is collecting and reporting on, we can exploit that. Similar games happen when random ‘fishing trawlers’ of Chinese or Soviet Russian make shows up around the time we launch from Cape Canaveral.
Good point. Probably quite a bit based on SIGINT, but there may be some passive recording or technology intended to be retrieved later that we would snag first. Besides, the iteration of new sensors can be way faster for balloons if they don’t have to be designed/tested for spaceflight–we’d want to find out how far they’ve come to analyze against the next one.
I’m not surprised the balloon can ‘maneuver’–hot air balloons do it all the time at the ABQ Balloon Fiesta. One benefit of balloons though, is that they can loiter longer than satellites, thus potentially soaking in more data at a given location. Nor am I surprised at an over-water shootdown: much easier to keep it out of the public media’s view, so the Commies are kept guessing at what we recover.
Tripler
I could go down the cat-and-mouse theories all day.
You can’t program a helium balloon to not leak helium. But if it was descended deliberately, that would be so it got a closer view of whatever it was trying to view.
And, as this had happened at least three times under the previous administration without them being shot down, why would the Chinese have thought it necessary to take precautions against that happening this time?
From what I’m seeing this did not happen three times during the last administration or any administration. It’s hard to say for certain since specific details have not been released. All that was said was something about brief incursions into US airspace. I saw mention of possibly Hawaii once. Most likely they are talking about transit near Hawaii and/or Alaska. There certainly wasn’t a flight across the continental United States. Lots of people outside of the government would have noticed.
At least one of those balloons overflew Texas and Florida.
Here’s one: Weather balloons exist. Spy balloons don’t. This thing exists, and in that regard, it’s a lot more like a weather balloon than a spy balloon.
Unless I’ve missed it, nobody who’s calling this thing a “spy balloon” has yet to offer any possibility of what it could actually be spying on.
Hard to fly over just portions of Texas going west to east unless you are talking about just the tip. That doesn’t invalidate what I said. Any previous incursions were along the sidelines not straight down the middle between the hashmarks. It’s a matter of degree but it’s an important distinction. Does anyone doubt Trump would have had it shot down over downtown Chicago rather than let it cross the entire country? I’m not saying it would have been the correct action but he wouldn’t have taken the same action. I also wouldnt find it hard to believe that the military didn’t tell him about the brushes against our airspace or maybe it was in one of his daily briefings that he didn’t go to.
I apologize for getting off topic lest a moderator jump on us.
300+ posts into what’s now a semi-silly MPSIMS I don’t think we’ve got much to fear. But your point is valid. Sidebar over. Thanks.
I’ve been puzzled by this statement, but nobody else seems to have questioned it. Why? Like why does it matter either way, such that one would hope it is the record? I seriously have no idea.
I asked you what characteristics a spy balloon would have that a weather balloon wouldn’t and your answer is “it doesn’t matter, I will accept nothing.”
Cool. The Straight Dope is obviously the right place for you. /s
I can’t imagine Loser Donald lifting a finger to do anything about anything in a state that didn’t vote for him.
I would hope that one characteristic we would agree that a spy balloon must have would be a capability for spying, right? So, tell me what capability a balloon would have for spying.
I mean, at this point, you might as well ask me how I know it’s not a unicorn.
If it was a Russian balloon he’d probably have complimented Putin on his spy agency’s excellent navigation skills. And asked for an autographed pic of the Trump building downtown.