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It's come to my attention that in addition to the F-117 everyone acknowledges that they had shot down, Serbian military records list a shoot-down of a B-2 , which crashed in Croatia, using a similar method - booting up the radar extremely briefly during a NATO bombing mission. Saw loads of targets - one of them was ~ 15km away, looked very peculiar. Fired two S-125 missiles at it. The plane immediately started evading but was damaged by either or both 60 kg blasts, and then crashed just outside of Serbia, in Spačva basin.
Here's the fairly pretty interesting in-depth account on how it supposedly went down. It opens up with claiming that after may 20, 1999, all B-2 bombing missions of Serbia ceased, that the Spirit of Missouri was withdrawn from combat operations on May 20 and also presents a possibly verifiable claim that a section of near border woods in Croatia had an unusually heavy military presence.
At the end is they also present a Serbian hypothesis that the 2008 crash of B-2 in Guam was staged by crashing a remote-controlled B-2 test article that was secretly assembled at Guam, crashed via stall at takeoff and then passed off as the plane lost in '99.
Found this interesting bit of information on Quora, from a Serbian.
/images/1751914589569709.webp
EDIT: interesting info on in New York Times from 1991.. Full article.. I was previously unaware B-2 was ever found insufficiently stealthy in tests.
Strange and convenient coincidences of this kind happen more than you might think. Pakistani civilians in Abottobad reported that several Navy SEALS were killed during the Bin Laden raid when their Blackhawk crashed, and that they saw bodies and body parts being loaded onto another helicopter for evacuation. A few weeks later, a helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan, killing about half of the exact same SEAL team that were on the Bin Laden raid.
Carrier groups fighting the Houthis in the Red Sea suffer all manner of random bad luck. Bad luck that strangely always seems to coincide with Houthi claims that they have struck American carriers. The USS Eisenhower had to be towed out of the Red Sea due to unspecified mechanical issues a day after the Houthis claim to have struck it. A few months later several members of its air wing died in a helicopter training crash. The USS Truman suffered extensive damage due to a freak collision with a civilian merchant ship just days after its Red Sea deployment. It also lost a fighter a few days after that because... because it just fell off the ship ok??
An American Marine general was mysteriously found dead in his quarters at 29 Palms Marine Base in California. Coincidentally he had just returned from unspecified duties in Ukraine. Coincidentally there had just been a particularly large round of Russian ballistic missile strikes against Ukraine, many of which OSINT analysts theorized were targeting NATO military advisors in Kyiv.
Members of elite special forces units tend to die in helicopter crashes during training exercises off the East and West coasts. Usually these training mishaps happen a few days or weeks after major Ukrainian offensives. A particularly nasty one claimed the lives of several Delta Force soldiers about a month after October 7, 2023. It was confirmed that Delta Force was assisting the IDF during raids to rescue hostages held in Gaza, but this crash is of course completely coincidental and did not happen anywhere near the Middle East.
I am not saying that this is impossible, but why cover up losses of the Bin Laden raid, even from a helicopter crash? Between the White House, the chain of command and the intelligence agencies, there were probably about a hundred people in the loop. I have a hard time imagining Obama saying "I will not have this day of triumph be overshadowed by some fucking technical failure. Make the bodies go away, I don't care how." This would be a textbook case of the coverup being worse than the crime. Just announce that some people died in the raid and classify the details for a decade.
Likewise, if I imagine a general being killed by Russian ballistic missiles, in most cases the body will not be in a state where you can put him in his quarters and pretend it was a natural death. So your theory would need an epicycle like "he died from a heart attack when a missile hit nearby", which would be a lot less plausible.
Or take the ships. Hundreds of sailors will very much be aware if the ship was hit by a rocket. A missile hit likely looks very distinct from an engine failure on satellite photos. Then you need to find a civilian ship to stage the collision. The mundane explanation is at least plausible: Navy vessels generally run without transponders, so sometimes they collide with ships, and due to the Suez canal there are a ton of merchant vessels in the red sea.
For special forces killed during some off-the-book op, I can almost see it. But even then, the straight and narrow would seem preferable. X was killed in action in that month during a classified operation, more details in half a century. Covering this up as a training accident would be complicated. If they were killed in infantry combat, you will need to make sure that the bodies burn in the crash. You will also need to find a plausible helicopter pilot whose body you can add to the pile. Presumably you don't want to murder them for it? You will waste a ton of taxpayer money on blowing up the helicopter, and you need the cooperation of the deceased soldiers comrades who should preferably confirm your story of them being hale before departing from their base for their training exercise. These soldiers will probably not be very sympathetic to you desecrating servicemen corpses to cover some minor international embarrassment.
I don't buy the collision story alternate theory bc I saw it discussed by sailors. It was just a crash. US warships crash into merchant shipping with some regularity - whether it's more or less often than other navies I don't know.
The fighter that fell off board story stinks a little. There's no conceivable reason why a carrier would be taking evasive action short of torpedoes in the water, which the Houthis don't have. From the POV of a missile the carrier is essentially stationary, whatever direction it moves is irrelevant.
So saying "oh fighter fell off bc evasive maneuver" smells like BS.
Not really. If there's fragmentation or overpressure damage and the guy is promptly stuck into a fridge..which is usually possible in UA cities, the body would look superficially fine. A keen eyed medic could spot it but you can always swear some guy to secrecy and just fix it, no? Isn't there a regulation allowing something like that. Bystanders would see a corpse being removed.
Doesn't really make sense why a general would be there tho. Pretty sure only tech specialists who really have to be there and rarely special forces go there.
Concurred. I was onboard a carrier while it performed emergency maneuver drills after a shipyard period (max speed ahead to max speed reverse, full speed turns, exactly the sort of things you'd do as "evasive maneuvers"). None of the motion was violent enough to have caused a plane to fall off the ship during towing unless the person driving the tow vehicle was completed retarded. Carriers are huge and change directions very slowly.
That being said, I can also report from my time in the Navy that retards were very common and unbelievably expensive and unbelievably stupid accidents definitely happened.
Maybe combine the tilt when turning + a big wave + whoever was in charge of towing not eating their crayon ration and forgot to secure some flavor of connector?
Should it have happened? No, but humans are profoundly innovative in finding new ways to fuck things up.
Yeah, having gotten some more info from people in this thread, I'm coming around to it just being a spectacular fuckup by the guy towing.
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Seems it can make a 90° turn under 30 seconds, but acceleration is likely sluggish so evading anything but torpedoes seems... questionable. Anyway, carriers can tilt up to what looks like 15° during tight turns... I guess the planes /decks / towing equipment aren't designed to not slide when at maximum tilt.
https://old.reddit.com/r/navy/comments/1ka8nsu/updated_information_about_todays_hornet_loss/mpkdmng/
Given the reports of terrible procurement policies in various armed forces and how bloat, cost over-runs, and inability to deliver a working product are endemic, it might just be exactly this: "well you never said you wanted us to factor in that a ship, at sea, will be rolling and heaving and tossing and turning when we were designing for 'dead level still as a millpond nobody's shooting at us' conditions!"
Disagree with this. Carriers have been performing extreme maneuver drills on a regular basis with planes onboard since they first were created, and the Nimitz class has been doing it since the first one was commissioning in 1975. Planes don't usually fall off during these drills.
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