That's the problem. Its now public that Elon made the offer. If it was done quietly, that would be a different story. Maybe he did make the offer quietly, but it was refused.
Boeing fly F-16s and Lockheed sometimes fly F/A-18s. I've heard stories about the engineers/test pilots exchanging safety of flight related information to a competitor. This is done with full permission of both companies.
It's pretty clearly an exercise in astronavigation.
The livestream event itself mentioned it was taking place at the Northrop facility in Palmdale.
This author is not responsible for what clickbait farms do.
Aside: I'm not even sure this plane will end up doing flight testing somewhere secret in Nevada. They may just do it out of Edwards South Base, which is an "interesting" location not many in the public know about.
Given that you can view the accurate ICAO hex address for his aircraft on registry.faa.gov, it's clear that he's not part of the PIA programme. ElonJet didn't do anything other than automate an API feed from ADSB Exchange, which uses the hex from the FAA.
I think this company is a customer of Boeing's. Boeing builds their satellites.
As for the airlines, they are so heavily regulated that they might think twice about filing official comments on stuff like this without permission. No doubt FAA and FCC are talking about this even if it's not official. Their offices are only a few blocks away.
Note the 'PIA' flag and lack of additional information that would normally be pulled from the registry. In fact if you searched the registry for A0FE01 you would not find the actual aircraft but a placeholder.
Musk uses three jets, N628TS, N272BG, and N502SX. None are in the PIA programme, all are easily visible on ADSB Exchange and most importantly have their ICAO hex codes listed publicly on the FAA registry, along with ownership information.
It's not military. It's private weapons development company. There's no payload, so they do not need to notify commercial airliners, and it's a classified project, so they cannot anyway.
They are testing hypersonic missile systems for both ABM and warhead delivery.
Agreed! They didn’t even mention the manufacturer of the airplane but mentioned the relevant government initiative at least twice. Reads like a city hall press release.
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