Why was the Air Force plane’s transponder turned off? This is negligence that almost killed a plane full of people and endangered a national security operation. Outrageous.
It's expected for military operations to fly without transponder, they don't want to have their location visible. But it's crazy that they're also doing it in Curacao controlled airspace without agreeing a restricted area.
Even for training they set up restricted/military areas in airspace all the time. Not doing it here, in allied (Curacao is part of the kingdom of the Netherlands) airspace is unacceptable. They could have coordinated this in the normal ways so ATC would route civilian traffic around the military operations or talk to the military controllers (who can see both types of traffic) before sending an aircraft through the shared airspace.
This isn't new, it's how military operations are done all the time.
Just a reminder the US military also conducts training operations around large civilian airports within the USA, with their ADS-B turned off, in this instance resulting in the death of 67 people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Potomac_River_mid-air_col...
>Just a reminder the US military also conducts training operations around large civilian airports within the USA
that's misleading.
"The helicopter was part of the Continuity of Government Plan, with the flight being a routine re-training of aircrew in night flight along the corridor. In emergencies, elements of the US government would use it to evacuate the capital." Since the helicopter training flight needs to take place in proximity to the US government, and the airport serves Washington DC, they are of necessity juxtaposed.
the US military does not seek out large civilian "airports" within the USA to run training operations. In this case it's just "airport" that happens to be near where the training needs to take place.
Curacao is a few kilometers of the Venezuelan coast, but the Americans have deemed the entire ocean north of Venezuela as military operations. The people in charge probably don't even know Curacao isn't part of Venezuela.
With effectively no military and the Dutch government being an American lapdog, I doubt the people in charge need to care. They're already out there with orders to commit war crimes, shooting down an airliner or two that gets too close to their military aircraft wouldn't make much of a difference in the long run.
> The people in charge probably don't even know Curacao isn't part of Venezuela
assuming Lieutenant General Evan Lamar Pettus is in charge
"""
Bachelor of Science in Aeronautical Engineering, United States Air Force Academy
Master of Business Administration (MBA), Bellevue University
Master of Science in Logistics Sciences, Air Force Institute of Technology
Master of Strategic Studies, Air War College
Euro-NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training
U.S. Air Force Weapons School graduate
Squadron Officer School
Air Command and Staff College
Combined/Joint Forces Land Component Commander Course
Combined Force Air Component Commander Course
Senior Joint Information Operations Applications Course
Combined Force Maritime Component Commander Course
Joint Flag Officer Warfighting Course
Operational and Leadership Training
Qualified as a command pilot with more than 2,700 flight hours in aircraft including the F-15E and A-10, and multiple combat deployments (Operations Northern Watch, Southern Watch, Allied Force, Enduring Freedom, Iraqi Freedom, and Inherent Resolve).
Completed F-15E Weapons Instructor Course
"""
but yeah, he probably doesn't know Curacao isn't part of Venezuela.
> Curacao is a few kilometers of the Venezuelan coast, but the Americans have deemed the entire ocean north of Venezuela as military operations.
Are you suggesting Lieutenant General Evan Lamar Pettus did that? Or Hegseth and Trump? Because that's clearly what hte parent was referencing. So, please, explain to me how Lieutenant General Pettus deemed the entire ocean north of Venezuela as military operations on their own without the involvement of Hegseth or Trump. Or admit you are wrong.
(Hegseth may've accidentally texted it to a reporter, though. That'd be on brand.)
It's very clear that the upthread comment was referring to the administration - headed by a guy prone to word salad and outright lies - not the folks way, way down the chain doing the flight plans.
Look, I understand, but we have a concrete event here that is being discussed and there is no evidence anywhere for what you came up with. Adding feeling-based imagination instead of sticking to facts just makes the discussion much worse - and much closer to behavior you seem to object to.
This same comment could be posted verbatim on practically any past discussion about terrible things that have happened and been happening. At what point is it fair to raise or discuss the bigger problems?
Turning the transponder off only prevents civilian ATC from knowing your identification and altitude. They will still see your position as a primary target on their radar.
> It's expected for military operations to fly without transponder
It's been a problem specifically with US military aircraft for years that they just wander into other people's airspace with transponders off and expect to have it all to themselves.
We should just start shooting down anything big enough to need a transponder that is not using one. Doesn't matter who's in it, doesn't matter what it's for.
> We should just start shooting down anything big enough to need a transponder that is not using one. Doesn't matter who's in it, doesn't matter what it's for.
Maximum destructive, irreversible response.
Even if you think this is sometimes warranted, have you thought of the edge cases? You seem perfectly happy to be shot down yourself, sitting in your airplane with a failed transponder.
What's gotten into you to want to kill people so much?
There are already things in place for dealing with failed transponders.
It's bad enough that the US already deliberately shoot at their allies (look at all the "friendly fire" incidents the US cause) without them sneaking about in protected airspace without identifying themselves.
If there's a military plane flying around without any identification, it's either a Russian flight up to no good or an American one up to no good.
> We should just start shooting down anything big enough to need a transponder that is not using one. Doesn't matter who's in it, doesn't matter what it's for.
indistinguishable from what someone in the current administration would come up with
Unfortunately the current administration just lets the Americans and the Russians tell it what to do and puts up with murderous attacks from both with a shrug of the shoulders.
They can't declare war, that would require approval from congress. They're relying on the post-9/11 authorization granted to the president to use the military to go after terrorists and those that harbor them.
That is why this administration is leaning heavily into calling the drug traffickers "narco-terrorists" and calling fentanyl their "weapon of mass destruction". They're covering their ass legally so they can invade another country without congressional approval.
This is what they're using, the legal theory is basically tren de aragua cartel and their drugs is an "invasion" of the USA and is "sufficiently connected" to the Venezuelan government to trigger the act's wartime powers.
The only powers this act grants is the power to deport foreign nationals without due process, it does not grant them any powers to militarily invade another country.
To be clear, the post-9/11 AUMF is "specific" to people affiliated with the perpetrators of 9/11. Obviously a nexus can be drawn between a gigantic array of people to the perpetrators of 9/11, and this feature has been abused for decades now, but the Venezuelan situation clearly does not actually (or even allegedly) have any nexus whatsoever to 9/11 and so is clearly not authorized by the 2001 AUMF.
Sure, it wouldn't hold up in any reasonable court, but all they really need is to give congress some excuse to not intervene and pretending this falls under the 9/11 AUMF is good enough. And once the U.S. is at war with Venezuela not even a court order from the supreme court is going to be able to reverse that.
Even without a deceleration of war, any use of the military requires congressional approval unless it falls within some authorization congress has already granted.
I think you have "war" confused with "blowing up people we're suspicious of". It goes perfectly with "imprisoning and/or deporting people we're suspicious of".
I served. While in basic training, the drill sergeants taught us why we salute differently than other countries (probably apocryphal) - because we've "never lost a war". I'm cheeky now and I was then, so I asked about vietnam.
"Police Action" came the terse reply. "We don't talk about that one."
Course by then I'd already signed on the dotted, so...
We’ve never lost a war but we’ve definitely failed to accomplish our objectives a few times along the way. We built the greatest hammer the world has ever seen then asked it to saw lumber and wondered why it failed.
Real quick, I'm trying to remember a word, it's on the tip of my tongue. It's when one country uses military force in order to make another country have significant internal political changes. Just on the tip of my tongue....
As if these kind of people care about such a threat. They do not care about "their" country, "their" country is a resource they control. They very much prefer to sacrifice the whole countries population until the tanks stand in front of their bunker and then they take the "clean self-exit".
We? Seems like a personal vendetta from my perspective. I in no way shape or form want to send Americans to Venezuela for the holidays to start an armed conflict.
Gotta think about economy and those sweet sweet deals bringing tons of money and power to orange clan err economy and jobs! Its all fault of mexicans after all! Anyway I am sure there can be a new resort/casino or two somewhere there
That Trump is even near the reigns of power is obviously an indictment of many facets of American culture and politics, but it doesn't really wash out to every individual American bearing responsibility the way you're suggesting here.
Most of us didn’t vote for Trump. A slim majority of voters did, many of them because he is generally anti-war. (I’ve never liked or voted for him, but his desire to end wars is sincere.)
Many of his ardent supporters are confused as to what we’re doing in Venezuela right now and feel it’s the opposite of what they voted for.
You certainly don’t expect this level of surprises from someone’s second term, but the unprecedented path of his political career has certainly made it much different.
And 88 million people signaled they were fine with either candidate, by not voting. 165 million people out of 264 millions eligible voters supported this.
> We don’t elect Presidents based on getting a majority of votes of all US citizens, even if they can’t vote.
We don't even elect Presidents based on getting a majority (or even plurality) of all voters who actually vote, though the method actually used usually (but not always) also happens to elect the person who does that.
Nope. Sorry. From outside the US, there is just the US. We dont understand your "us vs them" tribalism nor the political divide. Every US citizen at this point is responsible for what's going on. Regardless of who you voted for. All of this is due to decades of complacency by the citizenry, it's not some sudden surprising coup.
I'm not saying the rest of the world is in the clear though. I think many countries are headed in a similar direction. Hopefully this is the wakeup call we all need to step up and arrest this slide into authoritarianism that's happening everywhere.
The recent elections in the U.S. went mostly anti-Trump. Is that the type of action you are calling for? Or did you want something more than running for office and voting?
~60% of the 8M people that fled Venezuela are incline to support a military intervention, that number goes down to 40% estimated for those still inside, so about more than half the country want external action to get out of the dictatorship. That percentage is for external action, the percentage that voted against the dictator in the stolen election last year was calculated at 76%; so no, is definitely not just the MAGA fan base that want to see something happen.
A bad situation is not improved by an even worse one. It does speaks volumes to the desperation of Venezuelans that many would rather their own country get invaded if that rids them of Maduro.
You’d be surprised. Last month on a visit to the U.S., 8/10 Uber drivers I had were Venezuelan. I’m a fluent Spanish speaker so I engaged in this very topic. The vast majority of them wanted Maduro out, and the fastest way to that is through U.S. intervention. They were not opposed to this.
1. This is a bit of a selection bias, since they are in the US, they aren't going to be the ones in the line of fire. It's all upshot for them.
2. Turn back the clock two decades ago, I'm sure plenty of ex-pat Iraqis wanted Saddam out, but half a million dead and a ten-year civil war and also fucking ISIS may have been a bit above what they were willing to pay. If I were living in a country ruled by a deranged autocrat (...), I too would like to see him removed, but that doesn't mean I'd invite war over it. (And the knives-out-nightly-disappearance repression that will inevitably follow.)
3. Given who Trump sucks up to and appoints, I'm sure he'll find his own monster to replace Maduro with. (The US track record with this in the Americas has been incredibly awful, but I've no doubt that he can set a new lowest bar.) He sure as shit won't be putting some lady who won a peace prize in charge.
Yes, I suppose you have successfully provided a counter-argument to my point, and I have to concede it - there are people with more skin in the game than the average MAGA who want to stick their former neighbours' hands in the fire, to check if it is hot.
Political expats and exiles do tend to favor invasions of their countries more than the people who live in them do, and I've not considered their viewpoints in this.
You have to own it at this stage. Even if you didn't vote for it. Particularly as that tangerine is in for a second innings. All the world wants to hear is what you're doing to fight the situation, not that it's not your fault.
Common sense would dictate that a military aircraft conducting military operations off the coast of a hostile nation tend to not want to broadcast their position to the world. So not outrageous, just unfortunate. It's extremely common.
On the other side it is perfectly visible on radar (and can be heard (and with jet having its own characteristic signature it can be tracked even by WWII microphone array like they did back then) and visible in binoculars from large distance in nice Caribbean weather), so it is hiding only from civilians. Security by obscurity kind of. That is especially so in the case of a slow large non-maneuvering tanker plane like here.
And why would a tanker plane come close to and even enter the hostile airspace?! may be one has to check Hegseth's Signal to get an answer for that, probably it is something like "big plane -> Scary!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mUbmJ1-sNs.
I can just about guarantee it has nothing to do with targeting and a lot to do with making Venezuela unsure when strikes are about to start, both for security of the forces launching the eventual strikes (if any) and to harass/wear-down Venezuelan air defenses by keeping them very alert.
If our aircaft were flying transponders-on during all these exercises then suddenly went dark, it’d signal imminent attack. This keeps them guessing. Possibly we’re even playing around with having them on some of the time for some aircraft, and off at other times.
We don’t do that with AWACS and such near Russia because we’re not posturing that we may attack them any day now, and want to avoid both accidental and “accidental” encounters with Russian weapons by making them very visible. In this case, an accidental engagement by Venezuelan forces probably isn’t something US leadership would be sad about.
I live near JBLM in Washington. I am routinely overflown by helicopters and planes (C-17s) often with their transponders off (I have an ADS-B receiver running on a VM). These are training flights that are not going anywhere outside of the Puget Sound region. For added fun, I'm also pretty close to several Sea-Tac approaches.
> is significantly more precise than what you will get with radar
Is that increase in precision much larger than the plane itself? If it's not then it couldn't possibly matter in this application.
Further radar is not a static image. The radar is constantly sweeping the sky, taking multiple measurements, and in some cases using filtering to avoid noise and jitter.
> GPS Lat & Long Barometric Altitude Ground speed & track angle Rate of climb/descent
You get or synthesize every one of those with radar as well.
Yes, ADS-B is significantly more precise than civilian primary radar returns. That's why the FAA is trying to move away from radar. The JetBlue near miss was about 150 miles from Curacao ATC which is beyond what most ASR systems cover (around half that).
Military radar is a different beast, but even then you're still trying to figure out what the returns mean. ADS-B explicitly says hey there are two aircraft in a tiny space. Civilian radar is likely not precise enough to identify two aircraft that close.
Isn't altitude information also one of the important things about ADS-B that radar lacks?
Although ADS-B is self reported and "vulnerable" to bad/spoofed info.
My CFI and I once saw ADS-B data from one of the startups near Palo Alto airport in California reporting supersonic speeds... at ground level, no less.
Edit: still have it in my email, heh. It was a Kitty Hawk Cora, N306XZ, reporting 933kts at 50'.
Even good stereopair like a WWI navy guns rangefinder, will give you all that info, of course not precise enough to lock a missile - well, transponder also wouldn't let you to anyway, and thus all that transponder precision is pointless in that context.
A missile only needs to get close enough for its sensors to take over for the final approach right? Transponder data should be quite enough for that, especially for a kc-46
Any of the methods i mentioned is enough to get missile close, except may be microphones as limited speed of sound means that the plane would have moved significantly from the observed position, though again even that would have allowed to put missile into the vicinity and in general direction.
Watching Ukraine videos there is new game in town though - relatively cheap IR cameras. Using IR, day or night, you can detect a jet plane from very large distances and just guide missile to the plane computer-game-joystick style.
You jest, but even in the age of modern warfare, countries still actively declare war and formally notify the other country, even if a bit late, with a formal declaration. The notable exceptions being of course the USA and the USSR and Russia, which like to call their wars "police actions" and "special military operations".
I would contend that we live in an era of “5th Generation” undeclared wars between powers. I don’t personally draw a line between a missile attack and a shipment of fentanyl or cocaine which will kill citizens all the same.
the redcoats didn't wear colorful coats and form nice big lines because they were stupid. They beat Napolean using similar tactics. And they didn't lose to the US because of these tactics.
Maybe you should reflect on why people who have lead others in combat have decided that there should be rules to war before you declare that rules of war are a bad idea.
The Red Coats lost quite a few battles to their aged tactics against the Patriots. So much so that officers complained about the ungentlemanly conduct routinely in their correspondence.
As far as our modern, temporary notion of “rules of war,” go, it’s because it suited the victor and gives them what they feel is an edge and an air of superiority. I don’t say this to be smug either, just look at how well the Geneva Suggestions worked out for the North Vietnamese or the Taliban. They ignored the and won.
Like it or not, the modern nation-state’s notions of Rules of War are going to quickly become a bygone relic of a simpler time, as was a formal British fighting line.
Military planes often deliberately have them on; not every mission is secretive. You can often see NATO planes on FlightAware in the Black Sea clearly keeping an eye on the Ukraine theatre.
I was speaking perhaps too casually, but "military things" was meant to mean offensive operations. The kind of things where you might expect to be fired upon (or at least need to take precautions against that happening). A transponder is a homing beacon for missiles.
You watch too many movies, there are plenty of other things for the missiles to track. Transponder in civilian airspace is just how you keep planes from crashing into each other.
I don't watch those kinds of movies. I have, on the other hand, worked for a large aerospace firm supplying these weapon systems.
A transponder is how civilian planes tell exactly where they are relative to each other. Missiles use IR, radar-bounce, and other methods for the last-mile delivery of explode-y bits, but when launched from afar (e.g. a surface-to-air missile launched from land towards something over the horizon) they need to be pre-loaded with the exact position of the target, as they need to get close to it before switching to a homing mechanism. If the target has a radio transponder, that makes this step trivially easy.
If Venezuela wanted to shoot one of these planes down, with the transponder off the missile is as likely to lock on to a commercial airliner. They're not going to take that risk.
And they often deliberately have them off, even for training flights, at least looking at my ADS-B receivers raw output and correlating to FA/FR24/etc.
Even for training they set up restricted/military areas in airspace all the time. Not doing it here, in allied (Curacao is part of the kingdom of the Netherlands) airspace is unacceptable. They could have coordinated this in the normal ways so ATC would route civilian traffic around the military operations or talk to the military controllers (who can see both types of traffic) before sending an aircraft through the shared airspace.
This isn't new, it's how military operations are done all the time.