F-22 Crashes in Alaska- Pilot missing

11/17/2010 - JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON, Alaska -- Search and rescue aircraft have discovered the apparent wreckage of an Air Force F-22 assigned to the 3rd Wing at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson.

The aircraft lost contact with air traffic control at 7:40 p.m. Alaska time yesterday while on a nighttime training mission.

To continue searching for the missing pilot, a rescue team is being dispatched to the area, approximately 100 miles north of Anchorage, by the Alaska Air National Guard Rescue Coordination Center, the 3rd Wing and Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson.

Air Force Col. Jack McMullen, 3rd Wing commander, held a press conference at 1 p.m. to make a statement and answer questions from the media.

"Last night a 'two-ship' of F-22s, Rocky one and Rocky three, were finished with training ... about 100 miles north of here," McMullen said.

Everything was normal until about 7:40 p.m., McMullen said, when Rocky 3 fell off the radar scope and the pilot lost communications.

"The other pilot (Rocky one) went to a tanker, got gas and then continued to look for the mishap pilot," McMullen continued. "He could not find him. At that time, the Alaska Air National Guard scrambled a C-130 and rescue helicopters. They searched the entire night."
About 10:15 a.m., an Alaska Air National Guard helicopter found a site that fits the data and the description of where we thought the mishap probably occurred, McMullen said.

"They found the crash site. They were unable to land at the crash site and take a closer look. We scrambled another helicopter that should be in the area in the next few moments." McMullen said.

McMullen thanked the Alaskan community and Alaska Air National Guard for their support at such a difficult time.

The name of the pilot is being withheld until the pilot's status is determined.

More information will be released as it becomes available.

Air Force searching for missing F-22.

BREAKING: Air Force says possible wreckage spotted. Search for pilot underway.

(Nov. 17) -- The Air Force is searching today for a missing F-22 fighter jet that lost contact with its Alaskan base during a training mission. The plane, which is based at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson near Anchorage, was carrying one pilot when it lost communication at 7:42 p.m. Tuesday local time. The Air Force has not released the name of the pilot.

The F-22 is a single-seat, twin-engine stealth plane built by Lockheed Martin. The missing plane became active in the service in the mid 2000s and was sent to Elmendorf in 2007, according to The Washington Post.

The Air Force describes the jet in a publicly available fact sheet:
The F-22, a critical component of the Global Strike Task Force, is designed to project air dominance, rapidly and at great distances and defeat threats attempting to deny access to our nation's Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps. The F-22 cannot be matched by any known or projected fighter aircraft.


The F-22 can "supercruise" or fly at supersonic speeds (greater than Mach 1.5) without using its afterburner. As of November 2009, each plane cost $143 million and the Air Force had 137 of them, according to Fox News. Last year, Congress put a hold on F-22 production by eliminating the $1.75 billion that would have paid for seven new fighter jets.


Update: According to several sources this morning, an Air Force F-22 Raptor is long overdue in returning from a training flight that left from Joint Base Elemendorf-Richardson in Anchorage. Air controllers lost contact with the jet Tuesday at 7:40 p.m. AKST, and a Pentagon spokesperson told CNN that the jet is "believed to be crashed."

The story is still developing, but a statement from JBER says that search and rescue crews are already on the job, and are focusing their attention on the aircraft's last known location, an area northeast of Cantwell.

The Air Force has not released the pilot's name, but Col. Jack McMullen, 3rd Wing commander said in the statement that the pilot is the Wing's main concern. "Right now, our top priority is to try to bring the pilot home safely," he said. "We will continue to search until we find our pilot. Our thoughts and prayers are with the family of this missing Airman."

UPDATE: ANCHORAGE, Alaska —
Searchers are concentrating on an area near Alaska's Denali National Park for an overdue Air Force F-22 fighter jet.

The jet, from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson near Anchorage, was on a training mission when it lost contact with air traffic control Tuesday night. The plane carries one pilot.

The Alaska Air National Guard is leading the search effort, using three helicopters and a cargo plane. In a news release, the guard says the F-22 was flying with another fighter, which also lost contact with it.

The search area is concentrated near Cantwell on the east side of the national park and about 150 miles north of Anchorage.

Spokeswoman Corinna Jones said Tuesday night that the jet, with one pilot aboard, was on a training mission out of the base and lost contact with air traffic control at 7:40 p.m. Alaska time.
“Right now, our top priority is to try to bring the pilot home safely,” said Col. Jack McMullen, 3rd Wing commander, in a release. “We will continue to search until we find our pilot. Our thoughts and prayers are with the family of this missing Airman.”

Jones says a search is under way. She declined to identify the pilot, but says the aircraft is assigned to Elmendorf's 3rd Wing.

Star Trek cloak closer to reality?

Physicists in the UK have proposed a "space–time" invisibility cloak that, if built, could be used to prevent signal interference or give the illusion of a Star Trek teleportation device.
The idea comes after four years of research by different groups that are creating devices to make objects invisible. In 2006 researchers at Duke University in the US created the first device that could cloak a small object in two dimensions in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Last year groups at Cornell University and the University of California at Berkeley, US, independently created 2D cloaks that operated at optical wavelengths. Then, earlier this year, a team at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany went one step further to produce a 3D optical cloak.
The latest development, by Martin McCall and colleagues of Imperial College, London, and the University of Salford, might see cloaks add yet another dimension to their capability: time. The idea is to create a tunnel through which an object could perform an action – move or change shape, for example – while appearing as though it is doing nothing at all.
A boon for thieves?

"It means that you can allow an object to do something for a short period of time in such a way that it can't be detected," McCall told physicsworld.com. "A good way to think about it is a small piece of an object’s history just being cut out, so you would see the object suddenly jump from one place to another." In principle, says McCall, such a system would enable a thief to enter a room, steal the contents of a safe and leave the scene as it was before, while security personnel watching CCTV are none the wiser.

In practice, the device would need two transparent walls to act as the tunnel, or space–time cloak. As an object enters the cloak to perform its action, the rear wall would compress light waves passing through from a source behind. Once the object completes its action and leaves the cloak, however, the front wall would stretch the light waves passing through so that they would merge seamlessly with those outside, whose profile had not been altered.

An analogy, says McCall, is a chicken crossing a busy road. Once the chicken steps onto the road cars must stop to let it pass, but as soon as it leaves the other side the cars would accelerate to catch up with the traffic ahead. To an observer farther down the road, the stream of passing cars would display no evidence of having slowed down.


Although McCall gives safecracking as a potential for the space–time cloak, his group does have ideas for more savoury applications. In the basic set-up it might appear as similar to a transporter from Star Trek, with a person entering the cloak on one side appearing at the other side moments later, apparently having skipped the journey. But the cloak could also find uses in signal processing: a detector placed inside the cloak would be able to "pause" a signal travelling through the wall while it first deals with a signal passing through the tunnel.

All of this, however, relies on someone being able to make the device – and in particular the walls that compress or stretch light waves. McCall admits a perfect implementation "is certainly beyond current technology", but points to advances in so-called nonlinear systems: materials that change their refractive index – a property that governs light propagation speed – given illumination with strong lasers. One of the problems with this route is that changes in refractive index introduce reflections, which means the cloak, while hiding the object within, would nonetheless reveal its presence with a telling glow.

But, explains McCall, "Provided we're prepared to throw away some aspects of the cloak, we can point towards more practical, proof-of-concept experiments that are currently accessible with current technology."

The research is published today in the Journal of Optics.

Jon Cartwright is a freelance journalist based in Bristol, UK

China hijacks Internet?

REAT Nearly 15 percent of the world's Internet traffic -- including data from the Pentagon, the office of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and other U.S. government websites -- was briefly redirected through computer servers in China last April, according to a congressional commission report obtained by the Washington Times.

It was immediately unclear whether the incident was deliberate, but the April 18 redirection could have enabled malicious activities and potentially caused an unintended "diversion of data" from many U.S. government, military and commercial websites, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission states in a report to Congress.

A draft copy of the report, which was viewed by the Washington Times, is to be released on Wednesday, and states that .gov and .mil websites were affected by the redirection, including websites for the Senate, all four military services, the office of the Secretary of Defense, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and "many others," including websites for firms like Dell, Yahoo, IBM and Microsoft.

LINK

Related Link:

RELATED LINK

This just in: After a detailed analysis experts have determined 80% of it was porn, 10% of it was jokes that had been forwarded a million times and the rest was spam. ;)

Beware of Thermal Imaging Cameras!