USAF Frantically Stole Parts From One RC-135 To Get Another Airborne To Spy On A Missile Launch
The swap meant the missile monitoring mission went ahead as planned, but it forced the service to delay another intelligence-gathering sortie.
By Joseph TrevithickOctober 17, 2018
It’s no secret that the U.S. Air Force’s aging, but vital RC-135 spy planes have been breaking down at an increasingly a worrisome rate for years now, often forcing the cancellation of important missions. Now, information from a declassified official unit history provides an especially clear example of how these problems can have cascading impacts on operational readiness and put the U.S. military’s ability to gather critical intelligence at risk when it matters most.
In 2016, one of the Air Force’s three RC-135S Cobra Ball aircraft suffered an unspecified maintenance issue while deployed to RAF Mildenhall in the United Kingdom. This would have rendered it unable to perform its scheduled mission, which was to collect information on the launch of an unknown ballistic missile system. The Cobra Ball aircraft have specialized equipment to track these types of weapons and gather telemetry and other electronic intelligence data, as well as visual imagery on them and their test flight operations.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/24292/usaf-frantically-stole-parts-from-one-rc-135-to-get-another-airborne-to-spy-on-a-missile-launch
