January 27, 2020
By Colin Dwyer
A plane crashed Monday (click here) in Afghanistan's eastern Ghazni province, and within hours, a swarm of conflicting reports had coalesced around the wreckage.
According to a U.S. official, the plane — a U.S. Bombardier E-11A — had two people on board, both of whom died in the crash. The official told NPR that the plane went down because of mechanical problems.
But that's not the only account of the incident.
A spokesman for the Taliban, Zabihullah Mujahid, told NPR that insurgents with the group shot down the plane and that it had CIA officials on board. Earlier Monday, Mujahid referred to the plane on Twitter as an "enemy intelligence aircraft" and said the bodies of the intelligence officials were still lying near the crash site in the Sado Khelo region of Ghazni....
I honestly don't know why the USA continually invests in advanced weapons, no one else that is an enemy of the USA has them, but, once they are lost to crashes, the then does have enough information to match the battlefield of the USA.
At this point, I think Trump owns the record of losing the USA's most sophisticated and expensive technology. The drone in the Straits of Hormuz and now the jet containing to USA military personnel over Afghanistan.
...BACN is essentially a set of airborne (click here) radios and data link terminals that fly on two different aircraft types, but those terminals include SADL—Situational Awareness Data Link—and Link 16. Then for the radios, there’s a UHF as well as SATCOM. Then we also have common data link downlink capability, which is a high bandwidth way to pass information.
The whole BACN system is flown airborne on the E-11 aircraft, and then also on the EQ-4B aircraft. A little more about those aircraft is that the E-11 is a commercial derivative aircraft [BD-700 Global Express] that has been modified. Then the EQ-4B is a version of the Global Hawk.
A high demand, low density asset:
Lt Col Helfrich: We have seven aircraft [four E-11s and three EQ-4Bs] and we’re flying essentially two 24/7 orbits, every day around the clock. Last year alone, we flew 21,000 combat flight hours over 1,500 combat missions and supported about 7,000 combat strikes in theater. That was just last year.
On the E-11 side, first off we have very good maintainers that keep the aircraft up and flying. The BD-700—the E-11s—have been a good platform for us, but we average about eight times as much [flight time] as other non-military BD-700s. It’s been a very good platform, but we’ve definitely pushed it, or we’ve been the fleet leader with the E-11s.
Why is it that the Russians are reporting from the center of the action?
