Noteworthy News

[Anomalocaris]

stealthy military aircraft operating in or near civilian controlled air space carry lungberg lens radar reflectors that allows it to be detected and tracked like normal aircraft by air traffic control radars.    but air traffic control radars don’t have great coverage of low altitude in hilly terrains and don’t necessarily have great data refresh rate, so it it were operating below, say 1000 feet it may not show up on any radar or show up only intermittently.

Ain't no hills down Charleston way.  It's barely above sea level.

even in dead flat country with no hills, ravines or man made radar obstacles like buildings   if the nearest air traffic control or airport surveillance radar is 30 miles away then it  won’t reliably see any aircraft operating below 500 feet,  40 miles away and it is 1000 feet

[arewethereyet]

Ain't no hills down Charleston way.  It's barely above sea level.

even in dead flat country with no hills, ravines or man made radar obstacles like buildings   if the nearest air traffic control or airport surveillance radar is 30 miles away then it  won’t reliably see any aircraft operating below 500 feet,  40 miles away and it is 1000 feet

You specified *low altitude in hilly terrains*.

Charleston is also lacking in skyscrapers.

[Nanny]

Good Ole Alabama

Alabama to use Nitrogen asphyxiation for executions

This opinion piece notes that the American Veterinary Association doesn't recommend killing mammals by Nitrogen gas. Only suitable for fowl. And the first candidate for the new method is a guy whose execution was botched once already.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/18/opini...=url-share
Shared from my NYT account.

[The Architect Of Fate]

Remember the Chinese spy balloon that everybody freaked out about?

It turns out that it wasn't a spy balloon, and everything China said about it was true.

Now, seven months later, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tells "CBS News Sunday Morning" the balloon wasn't spying. "The intelligence community, their assessment – and it's a high-confidence assessment – [is] that there was no intelligence collection by that balloon," he said.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-bizarre...y-balloon/

Why are you leaving out the rest of what the general said ?

[LinuxGal]

X marks the spot.  Debris field found in Indiantown north of Charleston in Williamsburg County.

(Fox News:  "Sure. Debris field.  Just like at Roswell.")

[Thumpalumpacus]

Update on the jet crash:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The crash of an F-35B Joint Strike Fighter aircraft in South Carolina over the weekend has raised numerous questions about what prompted the pilot to eject and how the $100 million warplane was able to keep flying pilotless for 60 miles (100 kilometers) before crashing.

Here’s what is known about the modern warplane and its latest incident:

‘FORCED TO EJECT’
A U.S. Marine Corps pilot was flying a single-seat F-35B fighter jet on Sunday when the pilot experienced a malfunction and was “forced to eject,” a Marine Corps official who was not authorized to speak publicly said on condition of anonymity. The aircraft was only at an altitude of about 1,000 feet (300 meters) and only about a mile (less than 2 kilometers) north of Charleston International Airport, in a populated area that led the pilot to parachute into a residential backyard.

[...]

On the Air Force and Navy versions, “the pilot has to initiate the ejection,” said Dan Grazier, a former Marine Corps captain and the senior defense policy fellow at the Project on Government Oversight, but the Marine version’s auto-eject is intended to better protect the pilot in case something goes wrong with the aircraft when it’s in hover mode. “Was that function triggered for some reason, and punched the pilot out?” Grazier said. “There’s a lot of unanswered questions.”

[...]

Other major questions include how the aircraft continued flying for 60 miles before crashing in a field near Indiantown, South Carolina, and why the pilot bailed out — if the bailout was intentional — of a plane that was able to keep operating for that long, said Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps Reserves colonel and senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Security.

“If it flew that far, could (the pilot) have landed it someplace — why punch out where he did?” Cancian asked.

[...]

Jeremy Huggins, a spokesperson at Joint Base Charleston, told NBC News that the jet was flying in autopilot mode when the pilot ejected from the aircraft.

https://apnews.com/article/f35-crash-mil...215d7f203d

[Nanny]

Somebody has some splainin to do

[Thumpalumpacus]

Somebody has some splainin to do

My guess, and that's all it is, is the seat autofiring due to buggy software.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Somebody has some splainin to do

I’m flashing on Gus Grissom: ‘That hatch just blew!’

Boru

[Ravenshire]

Somebody has some splainin to do

My guess, and that's all it is, is the seat autofiring due to buggy software.

Surely not in an F-35! [/sarcasm]