NK does not announce where their missiles are going, and NORAD probably wanted to clear some airspace to better track the missile, especially given that NK has missiles that can reach the west coast. The military also probably wanted to avoid dangerously confusing situations, like a civilian aircraft failing to squawk as expected or even a civilian plane crashing (just imagine what might happen -- NK is launching a missile, and suddenly NORAD is also tracking another object that seems to be an airplane without a transponder heading directly toward the Bay Area or receiving a call that some kind of explosion was just reported in LA following the object rapidly losing altitude...). It is not as if confusion during a tense moment leading to needless death is unprecedented in the history of aviation:
> NORAD probably wanted to clear some airspace to better track the missile
I can't see any way planes in Western US airspace could possibly interfere with tracking an NK launched ICBM, even by clutter, except maybe in the last minutes of the terminal phase of warhead descent at which point any defense (active or civil or both) would already have to have been committed to do any good.
Grounding planes is to mitigate risk to the people on the planes, and maybe to clear lines of fire for anti-missile systems (which is mostly about protecting people who aren't on the planes, but incidentally also protects those on the planes, too.)
Like I said, what if one of those planes had a malfunctioning transponder? It is a somewhat stretched scenario, but the NK military might have gotten bold and decided to shoot a missile all the way to the boundary of US territorial waters or airspace. In the middle of nervously tracking a missile that seems to be headed directly toward the west coast, NORAD suddenly sees another object that looks just like an airplane heading toward LA or SF, but it is not identifying itself. Now NORAD personnel have to take time to figure out if this airplane is just a malfunctioning civilian plane or some kind of NK attack.
Sure, NORAD probably tracked the plane from whatever airport it departed from, but during the missile test they probably want to have their personnel focus every second of their attention on the missile and not on checking some flight path.
Maybe it was because we have a secret Anti-Ballistic Missile system that "throws darts" at inbound missiles and we don't want any planes in the cross fire ?
The radar signature, altitude and speed would be completely different than any civilian aircraft. That was a mach 10 missile. For reference SR-71, the fastest plane that entered service (at least of those we know) has a speed of 3.2+ mach.
This is it. Look at how often this happens, recently in Iran and before that in Ukraine. Anti-missile and anti-air systems are extremely dangerous and reckless machines. Civilian flights get blown up all the time and being extra cautious makes a lot of sense.
Me too. Was thinking same thing. Don't want planes getting caught in the crossfire considering we would probably throw a drag net of intercepting missiles at it.
Looks like they may have launched a hypersonic missle that reached speeds of ~Mach 10[1], and the US (publicly, at least) seems to be lagging behind China and Russia in Hypersonic R&D - at least as of 2019[2].
How long would it take for a missile traveling at Mach 10 to reach a point where a high-altitude EMP attack[3] would cripple the west coast of the US?
Is that time longer than it would take for aircraft to return to a place where they could land? If NORAD spots a bogey moving that fast, is the rule right now just... everything stops until we understand what's happening?
Would love for someone who knows about hypersonics, NK missle capabilities, EMP attacks, etc. generally to say more.
I'm not an expert, just a rocket enthusiast, but "hypersonic" really just means "near orbital velocities".
There's a lot of noise about admittedly really impressive low-altitude air-breathing scramjets, but - as your articles point out - those are still a long way away. The war hawks like to complain that we're not spending sufficiently many billions on developing futuristic hypersonic scramjet missiles. They point to our lack of a working scramjet as evidence that we're doing poorly. And look! North Korea's launched a hypersonic missile, China's launched hypersonic test missiles, Russia's launching hypersonic missiles; we're behind in the next war and it hasn't even started yet!
But those are just orbital or sub-orbital rockets at 50-100km altitude. Of course they're hypersonic, but that's not really that difficult - just build a big rocket, go up for a while, then turn sideways. We've been doing it since the 50s, tech is good enough now that relatively small companies like Firefly Space are launching small satellites to LEO with Series A fundraising of just $75 million. Tada! Hypersonic! The main point is that everyone has the capability to launch lots of these simple rockets, which can be devastatingly effective. Not as effective as highly steerable reentry vehicles or hypersonic scramjets, but enough that no one wants to be a target.
It's not about the risk of your aircraft. It's the risk to your aircraft. In an actual emergency involving airspace violation, anything in the sky becomes a potential threat for interception.
Exactly. If you're potentially activating missile defenses, you probably want all civilian air traffic out of the sky. For their own sake.
Give the timing, uncertainty, countermeasures, and consequences of not intercepting... "Your flight leaves 30 minutes later" is a small price to pay vs "Passenger airliner shot down."
Airliners carry less than 1,000 people. Usually a lot less.
Nukemap says 10kt on downtown LA would result in about 71,000 immediate casualties.
Would you want to be in the air when someone at NORAD has to make a call on something that may or may not be a passenger airliner?
I'm not an expert or even novice on military weapons or defenses, so this response might just be Hollywood talking, but couldn't taking the planes out of the sky allow for a clearer shot of any deflection missiles/anti-air missiles or something like that?
That sounds pretty plausible. Also, how far does the EMP wave from a nuke travel? Would it minimize the potential damage to flying aircraft if they were on the ground compared to in the air? Or would it be a moot point and if in range of the emp, the blast itself would do more damage?
> In July 1962, the US carried out the Starfish Prime test, exploding a 1.44 Mt (6.0 PJ) bomb 400 kilometres (250 mi; 1,300,000 ft) above the mid-Pacific Ocean. This demonstrated that the effects of a high-altitude nuclear explosion were much larger than had been previously calculated. Starfish Prime made those effects known to the public by causing electrical damage in Hawaii, about 1,445 kilometres (898 mi) away from the detonation point, knocking out about 300 streetlights, setting off numerous burglar alarms and damaging a microwave link.
I guess that's the smallest of your worries if you are hit by a nuke.
> I guess that's the smallest of your worries if you are hit by a nuke.
Well.. from what you posted I guess it depends on if you are in the plane or not. It sounds like you could be at a distance where you survive the blast but are impacted by the EMP and it would probably suck to be at 30k feet in a plane that is hit by an EMP.
I don't think an EMP from a ground explosion would be significant. At least for a something 30k feet above it as I believe the pulse to be shaped horizontally and weak. To generate a significant EMP you have to detonate a nuke at high altitude as to cause a secondary EMP due to Earth magnetic field.
Even if a plane is hit by an EMP I believe the engines will keep working and the plane will have backup controls. Unless it's a Boeing of the newer generation where everything is electrical/digital. And even if everything stops working it will keep gliding unless at an odd angle/speed at the moment of the hit. That said loss of instruments and radio would be painful. Components getting damaged depends on the magnitude of the EMP and a weak pulse might cause only transitory malfunctions.
Note: my knowledge on this subject is superficial and I'm probably wrong.
> I’m not sure what possible risk there was to our aircraft. Specifically from a missile launch in NK.
NK nuclear armed and, has the estimated ability to hit the West Coast of the US with ICBMs, and is believed to be able to make warheads small enough to mount on its ICBMs now. (The first two have been true for quite a few years now, the last is more recent.)
The threat to people in planes is at least twofold:
One: EMP from a nuclear blast is not a good thing for aircraft.
Two: People on the ground can shelter to mitigate some of the risk from a confirmed incoming attack, people in planes cannot.
I’m not sure what possible risk there was to our aircraft. Specifically from a missile launch in NK.
It's not exclusively about the risk of a jet being hit in the air. But you don't want to route a bunch of jets to land in a city that no longer exists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007