At the beginning of the article they author mentions that there is no cell signal once you reach the camp.
Wouldn't a Cessna with a Stingray on board show up on your cell phone as a signal?
It was my understanding that the way the Stingrays works is that they broadcast a pilot signal just like a regular cell tower albeit a spoofed one.
Wouldn't you be able to see that your cell phone all of sudden has x bars signal when you hear or see the Cessna and then that signal would disappear when the Cessna leaves?
Cessnas are not that quiet and they aren't capable of flying that high to the point that you couldn't hear or see them right?
2) Was the entire course programmed into the plane? This is non-trivial given that high winds would likely push a small little plane off course.
3) Article claims that GPS telemetry was sent continuously. What did they use? Wifi doesn't work. There are no cell towers in the ocean. The only option that could remotely work is satellite data. That costs a fortune and has heavy equipment.
#3 is the big one.
EDIT: I am still skeptical but less so after reading the child comments. It seems HAM radio was used to relay telemetry. Communicating with a tiny moving object via HAM still seems a bit unbelievable. But I don't know enough on this subject. Also, the craft was supposedly using auto pilot over the Atlantic. I don't see how it is an RC craft ... perhaps a UAV would be a more appropriate term. Anyways, upvoting child posts for a stimulating early morning thought exercise :)
All modern aircraft are equipped with Mode-S transponders [1] which broadcast several parameters such as altitude, lat/longitude and aicraft ID info. There are also specific messages that signal "emergency status"[2].
You can 'listen' to these messages yourself with very basic radio equipment tuned to 1090 MHz[3].
Even though these signals can reach long distances (I remember getting ~300 Km with my home made antenna) it's possible that the plane was going through an area where no base stations exist.
They probably took the address from the caller and looked for the plane near there. Once finding it, they likely looked around the area for a guy with an RC remote.
Of course they could have also used a radio direction finder.
I wonder whether, had they chosen to contact the aircraft outside their sector, the Skyguide controller would have heard them. With VHF radio being line of sight, the aircraft would probably have heard them, but Skyguide would be based at a ground station that was perhaps occluded by nearby mountains or other buildings. Where I live, I can't pick up a VHF ground station which is nearly in my line of sight only fifty kilometres away.
The point about the mobile phones makes sense, though I'm sure if the plane flew over Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean or Japanese airspace their respective airforce or even ATCs would have picked the plane up from their radars.
Hmm but he was flying over a huge area - from Brooklyn Bridge, Statue of Liberty, apartment buildings on the waters-edge, etc.
I'm wondering if they used radio direction finder - but a) would they have that equipment to hand and b) how would they know what frequency to be looking on?
I was scanning for airplanes in my area using an rtl-sdr ... and a couple times I could see planes with my eyes and they were not broadcasting a signal like they were supposed to.... FBI?
Also, once I wasn't scanning but there was about 5 or 6 jets flying parallel at equal distance at high altitude covering the whole sky ... wonder what that could have been... they were all leaving a trail.
I've spent many, many hours talking to ATC and other aircraft. I don't know if the original story is true, but it's more or less believable. First off: I absolutely, 100% believe that pilots would do this. These are precisely the kinds of shenanigans one gets up to in the air.
The detail that makes this story not quite work for me is that it has civilian and military aircraft on the same frequency. That's now how it works in real life. They will talk to the same facility, but civilian aircraft use VHF and military aircraft use UHF. Coming into a certain dual-use airport we would often hear the ATC side of a conversation (tower transmitting on all its freqs simultaneously, which is normal) but we'd never hear the F-15s, for example.
I suppose, though, that it's possible that the military aircraft in the story switched over to the VHF frequency after hearing the ATC side of a hilariously (to them) slow speed check. I know at least some military ships have VHF capability, having talked to a few myself. Whether it's typical for the particular aircraft in the story to have VHF radios though, I don't know.
> They could hear ATC but not other aircraft, because civilian aircraft are on VHF frequencies, military on UHF, and anybody above 60,000 feet (like the SR-71's) were on a separate, center-wide UHF frequency so they wouldn't have to switch frequencies constantly. So the SR-71 and F-18 pilots couldn't have heard those other aircraft requesting groundspeed, or heard each other for that matter.
The SR-71 had at least 5 radios, according to the flight manual [1].
• COMNAV-50 UHF. It had two of these, one in the front cockpit and one in the aft cockpit.
• AN/ARC-186(V). This one covers the civilian aircraft frequencies (and a bit more such as the 2 meter ham band).
• 618-T HF. This covered AM and SSB on 2-30 MHz in 1 KHz increments.
• AN/ARC-190(V). Another HF radio, covering 2-30 MHz in 100 Hz increments.
It was a spy plane. Listening in on other aircraft and ATC would help it carry out its mission, so of course it is going to have plenty of radios.
At 37K feet, above the airplane, tracking really fast moving objects, in the direction the cockpit is facing, we are expecting a phone or a dash cam? C'mon
Hopefully, we never need an aircraft to be fully grounded with a tethered cable. That'd be ridiculous. As a kid, I had a plane that was tethered and would only fly in circles. Oh, where the mind wanders on a Friday
At the beginning of the article they author mentions that there is no cell signal once you reach the camp.
Wouldn't a Cessna with a Stingray on board show up on your cell phone as a signal?
It was my understanding that the way the Stingrays works is that they broadcast a pilot signal just like a regular cell tower albeit a spoofed one.
Wouldn't you be able to see that your cell phone all of sudden has x bars signal when you hear or see the Cessna and then that signal would disappear when the Cessna leaves?
Cessnas are not that quiet and they aren't capable of flying that high to the point that you couldn't hear or see them right?
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