Originally Posted by
falcon900
You tell me.
I was responding to the naivety of the reporting which suggested that they were “blind”.
More to the point, the reporting that it couldn’t have happened to Air Force One ( which I believe it could not). I suspect it couldn’t have happened to the Voyager either. But yes , give the defence secretary a thrill by flying close to Russian airspace in essentially a business jet to save a few bob, and this is what will happen.
How the incident comes to be in the public domain might seem like a good question to some people too.
The answer on public domain is that there were journos on board. The hype is all about specific targeting of the aircraft, which is nonsense, as is the sensationalist language. And if the journos hadn’t known, a helpful Spad would probably have put them in the picture as a means of bigging up their man (tough task).
As others have pointed out, commercial traffic has been subject to this for some years now as spillover from Russian ops in Syria, Ukraine and Black Sea. The difference now is that the capability has moved from simple jamming to spoofing, which the major OEMs are working to prevent. The mil ops community has just not talked about it, for obvious reasons, but you can assume there is no immunity from receipt of a broadcast jam/spoof signal, the effects of that signal being unique to the system involved.
We can but hope the direct experience gives SofS a bit more empathy when it comes to agreeing procurement proposals.