On August 11, 2011 Air Force ground controllers lost contact with one of the military’s most advanced — and expensive — drones, an EQ-4B Global Hawk as the jet flew high over Eastern Afghanistan. Nine hours into an otherwise smooth communications relay mission using the Battlefield Airborne Communications Node (BACN), the plane was cruising at […]
Afghan Update
The great photo showing a UH-60 Black Hawk of Task Force Poseidon flying over the snow covered mountains just south of Bagram airfield in Afghanistan was just sent to us by the task force’s PAOs. TF Poseidon includes choppers of the Army’s 82nd Combat Aviation Brigade deployed to Regional Command East (RC East) in Afghanistan.
Does anyone know anything about the mysterious RQ-4 Global Hawk crash that occurred downrange — possibly just inside Pakistan close to the Afghan city of Jalalabad — last August? The Air Force’s crash report database doesn’t allow you to open up the accident investigation board’s report on the incident which received surprisingly little media coverage. I say this because the Global […]
So, this is some drone-related news about the Afghan war that we missed. While most media attention has been focused on CIA drone bases in Pakistan, the U.S. last year transformed the remote ex-Soviet air field at Shindand, near the Iranian border, into the second biggest air base in all Afghanistan. The perimeter of the […]
It’s official, the Air Force has selected Embraer’s A-29 Super Tucano as the Light Air Support (LAS) aircraft, better known as a counterinsurgency (COIN) plane. The air service is buying 20 Super Ts from Embraer and its U.S. partner, Sierra Nevada Corporation, for $355 million, according to an announcement that Embraer released last night. Remember, […]
