PurpleToolBox

"Aggressive"? Really?

SayAlt

Aggressive?

Yeah, I'd say so....






Very little margin for pilot error, catastrophic failure/some freak Mx thing like what caused that P-51 to crash into the crowd line at Reno a few years back.

Which is why they call this "aggressive".

Btw, my understanding is peaceful flyovers always parallel a ship's heading, whereas an attacking (or aggressive) pass is normally(?) made perpendicular to the ship's heading.

rickair7777

Not really. The world is different now. In another AOR that bird would have been splashed for sure. It's really putting the CO on the spot to trust the Russian's skill and make assumptions about their intentions. If he guesses wrong, he might not get to see his kids again. He might just decide "eff that guy, I'm going home to my kids". BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRP. The button is right under his hand. Dangerous, dangerous game.

Otterbox

Nope, not really at all. This really isn't unexpected or unusual when you look at how our interactions have been with the Russians in recent history.

There was virtually no danger of those aircraft getting shot down by the ship. Foreign powers attempt to force overreactions from our crews all the time (aka charge the ships in an attempt to get it to shoot at them so the ship gets pulled from theater and were too ashamed politically to send a replacement). Is it annoying? Yes. Is it exciting? Yes but a lot of our training and qualifications these days goes into when to not shoot a guy, and these incidents were one of those times. Other countries do this to us all of the time because they know how restrained our reactions will be.

Makes good for CNN headlines though.

JamesNoBrakes

According to the article, we were 70 miles off their coast. Pretty sure we'd do something similar if they steamed a destroyer up off of Jacksonville in a similar fashion.

SayAlt

Actually, since the ridiculously labeled and totally inaccurate "End of the Cold War", Russia has been mostly benign and our respective militaries have been downright friendly with one another. Being broke and domestically (inwardly) focused does this to a military (Russia).

Only recently (since Russian invaded Crimea in 2014, in fact) has Russia returned to being so provocative with incidents like this, as anyone who reads and kept up with world news knows.

It's really simple. Flying within a mile or two of a warship at 1,000' or higher can be considered "normal", particularly when paralleling the ship's heading (ie. symbolically <and militaries are very symbolic> the gun barrels are not pointing at the vessel). In contrast, screaming in below the horizon at combat speeds perpendicular to the ship's heading and passing over the ship's deck at less than 100' is as "aggressive", provocative, unnecessary, and dangerous as it gets.

What REALLY frosts my cake is knowing that, if something went wrong and the plane hit the ship for some freak reason causing an international incident, there are actually American-born idiots who would blame the ship (and their own country) for it....

...the same folks who call this kind of thing "normal" and ask "what were we doing so close to Russia?" (ie. the uneducated and uninformed).

BoilerUP

Russian warships have been to Cuba numerous times, including the last 5-10 years.

I'm gonna guess no US military aircraft flew directly over their bow at less than 100' AGL.

SayAlt

I disagree.

Try looking at a map of the Baltic Sea sometime and see how big it is (hint: it isn't) and how many nations share it's coastline. Also realize that the ship in question was conducting training ops with the Polish military.

SayAlt

I'd say that's a good guess.

More likely, we had a 688 shadowing them, recording their sonar profiles, and making practice runs.

SayAlt

Question for you pros...

Is this considered "normal" in military circles?





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