2) Why aren't the military craft listening to the local flight channel? Aren't you supposed to monitor local traffic? Especially when flying without a transponder? It's not like you can't listen to multiple channels at the same time!
Why was the Air Force plane’s transponder turned off? This is negligence that almost killed a plane full of people and endangered a national security operation. Outrageous.
It's expected for military operations to fly without transponder, they don't want to have their location visible. But it's crazy that they're also doing it in Curacao controlled airspace without agreeing a restricted area.
Even for training they set up restricted/military areas in airspace all the time. Not doing it here, in allied (Curacao is part of the kingdom of the Netherlands) airspace is unacceptable. They could have coordinated this in the normal ways so ATC would route civilian traffic around the military operations or talk to the military controllers (who can see both types of traffic) before sending an aircraft through the shared airspace.
This isn't new, it's how military operations are done all the time.
Just a reminder the US military also conducts training operations around large civilian airports within the USA, with their ADS-B turned off, in this instance resulting in the death of 67 people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Potomac_River_mid-air_col...
Curacao is a few kilometers of the Venezuelan coast, but the Americans have deemed the entire ocean north of Venezuela as military operations. The people in charge probably don't even know Curacao isn't part of Venezuela.
With effectively no military and the Dutch government being an American lapdog, I doubt the people in charge need to care. They're already out there with orders to commit war crimes, shooting down an airliner or two that gets too close to their military aircraft wouldn't make much of a difference in the long run.
Turning the transponder off only prevents civilian ATC from knowing your identification and altitude. They will still see your position as a primary target on their radar.
> It's expected for military operations to fly without transponder
It's been a problem specifically with US military aircraft for years that they just wander into other people's airspace with transponders off and expect to have it all to themselves.
We should just start shooting down anything big enough to need a transponder that is not using one. Doesn't matter who's in it, doesn't matter what it's for.
We? Seems like a personal vendetta from my perspective. I in no way shape or form want to send Americans to Venezuela for the holidays to start an armed conflict.
Common sense would dictate that a military aircraft conducting military operations off the coast of a hostile nation tend to not want to broadcast their position to the world. So not outrageous, just unfortunate. It's extremely common.
On the other side it is perfectly visible on radar (and can be heard (and with jet having its own characteristic signature it can be tracked even by WWII microphone array like they did back then) and visible in binoculars from large distance in nice Caribbean weather), so it is hiding only from civilians. Security by obscurity kind of. That is especially so in the case of a slow large non-maneuvering tanker plane like here.
And why would a tanker plane come close to and even enter the hostile airspace?! may be one has to check Hegseth's Signal to get an answer for that, probably it is something like "big plane -> Scary!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mUbmJ1-sNs.
Military planes often deliberately have them on; not every mission is secretive. You can often see NATO planes on FlightAware in the Black Sea clearly keeping an eye on the Ukraine theatre.
unlikely, at least not during this generation. even putting aside the current admin, the US has (to put it extremely lightly) long failed to police its own and certain "allies'" behavior, which undermines the concept altogether.
at this point, there are unfortunately no "good guys" at the state level.
Someone has to prevent the execution of journalist who speak out against the regime and that has no due process and also have highest execution rate of any country. They labeled "Authoritarian state" by Amnesty International and Humans Rights Watch and "Systemic human-rights violator" by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Oh wait, i mixed up Saudi Arabia one of the US's closets allies with Venezuela.
If a bridge gets built then destroyed, built then destroyed, built then destroyed and so on, people will stop using it. They'll also stop trusting the bridge builder.
People all over the world are already building new bridges to places like China, so even if the old ones are rebuilt, they might get substantially less use.
I always get the impression that whenever military/police have the option to turn off ADS-B, they do. Not just in the US or by US forces. Not just on sensitive flights. I don't think the toggle ever gets used.
Not really. I live next to an airport with both a civilian and military presence (and an alternate for a NATO airbase). The number of military/police flights that I can only see on MLAT is pretty worrying. I don't think BPol has ever turned their "stealth" switch off.
In other news, the National Defense Authorization Act working its way through congress is trying to loosen restrictions around DCA that were put in place after a military helicopter collided with a passenger jet.
Call me crazy, but I think any time, any where, without any exceptions whatsoever, someone wants to fly a multi-ton chunk of metal, they need to broadcast telemetry in a cleartext, open standard.
I understand that this might be disruptive to people who want to drop explosives on other people, and while this disruption is a fantastic benefit, it's only a side-effect.
Yeah, exactly. I've been watching adsb activity over my house for years, and in the past few weeks, for the first time, I have activity (helicopter and jet) in my area that it not visible.
It's unnerving, and unbecoming of an egalitarian society.
We have the best mid-air collisions. Noone does it better, or so people tell me. We don't do sleepy silent disappearances over the Bermuda Triangle, that's SAD!! We blow em up, BIGLY, in someone else's airspace. A great PRESIDENT knows how to WIN at mid-air collisions. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
It's the first time I hear someone calls Curaçao a "nation". It's just the normal Dutch island, not even some special status territory. Yes, it's in Carribean, but why do they omit "Dutch" and call it a "Carribean nation"?
I find words in the same category as "country", "nation", "state", etc are increasingly used interchangeably. Largely because they tend to be far more specific than people mean to be... but also because generic terms like "polity" never caught on in the mainstream. A similar thing is how "nation-states" would appear to be the only type of place worth worrying about highly organized attacks from in infosec, until you ask them to define what they consider a nation-state.
That said, I don't think it's accurate to paint Curaçao as just another normal Dutch island the same as any other. It's really a constituent country that's part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, just not a sovereign state or a nation.
A nation-state is a state whose borders and (originally) citizenship are largely defined by a singular nationality. Israel and Japan, for example. Belgium and Canada are not nation states: they are split into French and Flemish, and Anglo and French nationalities, respectively.
It is a 19th century term that rarely applies these days, but still sees some residual usage.
It's hard to use them consistently because there isn't a single universally accepted definition.
Most people would consider the Netherlands a "country", but now we have a country within that country. Israel is a state, Japan is a state, but there are 50 states in the United States. "[People's] Republic of XYZ" generally refers to a sovereign state, but Russia has republics inside. You can't just call something what the locals call it and expect that your readers will get the picture. Even worse, people are often deeply divided as to what a given territory should be called.
So I will generally forgive journalists for picking a neutral-sounding, ambiguous expression in cases like this. What matters here is that the Dutch control this airspace, regardless of Curaçao's status within their kingdom.
What do you mean "all the way across the ocean". From where? The distance from Curaçao to the Dutch people is exactly zero.
What "right" are you talking about, is there an agency where we file a claim, and it issues us "rights"?
All people from all nations, tribes and states came from somewhere, sometimes even replacing the local population. Sometimes peacefully, like Anglo-Saxons pushed out local Britons in England, sometimes violently, like Normans invaded and conquered England.
Or like the rich and diverse American Indian history -- tribes came and went, sometimes replaced, pushed out, conquered or assimilated with previous peoples who lived there. Please define "right".
We didn't have the right, obviously, but it has happened and we need to deal with the current situation. And the Netherlands has offered them sovereignty multiple times in the last fifty years, they can leave anytime they want. But nowadays they want to stay in the kingdom, mostly because it offers them some security and stability.
The same business the US has in Guam or Puerto Rico, the UK in the Bahamas etc. It was a colony. They decided to become independent but still part of the kingdom of the Netherlands which was their choice. So the current status is such because the people of Curacao have decided they wanted it this way.
Not sure I’d call crossing traffic “within a few miles” a near-miss. Even at full cruising speed of 500-600MPH (less because the JetBlue was still on a climb) the civilian aircraft would cover a mile in 6-7 seconds, so we are talking 18 to 24 seconds to close 3-4 miles.
Also, it a common for military aircraft to not have a transponder on, especially in the vicinity of threats. Without a transponder the civilian aircraft TCAS/ACAS would not warn about traffic.
Not sure how far off the coast of Venezuela this occurred, but there are some very real SAM threats the Air Force aircraft would need to worry about.
Large aircraft take a while to avoid collisions due to their size and both jets are in motion. So this could have been within 5-10 seconds of a collision depending on specifics. The critical issue is the civilian aircraft “took evasive action on Friday to avoid a mid-air collision with a U.S. Air Force tanker plane near Venezuela, a pilot said in an air traffic control recording.”
Which needs to be reported as it then can impact other air traffic to avoid further issues.
Even if the military plane had its transponder off, the civilian plane didn't. The military pilot had no justification for not knowing the civilian plane was there and at a minimum adjusting its altitude to make this a non issue.
> Not sure I’d call crossing traffic “within a few miles” a near-miss. Even at full cruising speed of 500-600MPH (less because the JetBlue was still on a climb) the civilian aircraft would cover a mile in 6-7 seconds, so we are talking 18 to 24 seconds to close 3-4 miles.
Sweet, so they've got less than half a minute to avoid a collision.
> Not sure how far off the coast of Venezuela this occurred
64km off the coast of Venezuela.
> Also, it a common for military aircraft to not have a transponder on
Is it actually common for military aircrafts with transponders off to mix and match with public traffic in activate flight regions? One would think if there is threats somewhere, they'd first mark the region as restricted, so no public airplanes go there in the first place, then they can fly without the transponders.
> Is it actually common for military aircrafts with transponders off to mix and match with public traffic in activate flight regions?
As a pilot, I can tell you it happens all the time. Even in US domestic airspace. Transponder use is optional for the military, and they will turn them off for some training missions. (Or in this case, a real mission.)
No, they don't close the airspace when this is being done.
The pilots of both aircraft (civilian and military) are supposed to be keeping a constant visual watch for traffic. The military aircraft should also be keeping an eye on primary radar.
(Transponder use is also optional for some civilian aircraft, btw.)
If the positioning [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUcs1LCjhcs) is at all close to accurate, that looks closer to 300km, with the entirety of Aruba between them & the closest point in Venezuela. (Or all of Curaçao, but I think that line is longer.)
(TFA does say 64 km, though.)
Edit: I'm not sure about 64 km. The 64km is for the Curaçao departing flight, but Curaçao's airport is itself 80 km from Venezuela, and they headed north pretty immediately? I.e., … they would have never been < 80 km…?
> Not sure I’d call crossing traffic “within a few miles” a near-miss.
Generally, from what I can find, the FAA definition is <500ft, so no, a few miles is potentially an issue, but not what would generally be categorized as a near miss unless there is some situational wrinkle that applies here.
The Air Force is probably used to flying much closer to one another, but civilians are not. Even in a busy airspace, jet airliners are usually kept apart >1000ft vertically, and much more horizontally in the direction they're moving. These birds can fly 500ft in less than 1 second after all.
> there are some very real SAM threats the Air Force aircraft would need to worry about
The US Air Force should /absolutely/ be worried about Venezuela fighting back, with SAMs or otherwise. This military action and potential war is a travesty and the whole world should condemn and ostracize the USA immediately.
After the near miss from JetBlue, there was another near miss with a business jet yesterday morning: https://nos.nl/l/2594640
ATC audio: https://youtu.be/Hto6aTt-X7A?si=2J-NnaXIcOnnWIqS
& the ATC audio on the same channel, but for the flight in TFA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUcs1LCjhcs
1) WTF is with the ATC in both of those
2) Why aren't the military craft listening to the local flight channel? Aren't you supposed to monitor local traffic? Especially when flying without a transponder? It's not like you can't listen to multiple channels at the same time!
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Why was the Air Force plane’s transponder turned off? This is negligence that almost killed a plane full of people and endangered a national security operation. Outrageous.
It's expected for military operations to fly without transponder, they don't want to have their location visible. But it's crazy that they're also doing it in Curacao controlled airspace without agreeing a restricted area.
Even for training they set up restricted/military areas in airspace all the time. Not doing it here, in allied (Curacao is part of the kingdom of the Netherlands) airspace is unacceptable. They could have coordinated this in the normal ways so ATC would route civilian traffic around the military operations or talk to the military controllers (who can see both types of traffic) before sending an aircraft through the shared airspace.
This isn't new, it's how military operations are done all the time.
Just a reminder the US military also conducts training operations around large civilian airports within the USA, with their ADS-B turned off, in this instance resulting in the death of 67 people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Potomac_River_mid-air_col...
Presumably they have flight plans, can listen to ATC, RADAR etc.
So what's the plan? Just expect everyone to get out of their way?
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Curacao is a few kilometers of the Venezuelan coast, but the Americans have deemed the entire ocean north of Venezuela as military operations. The people in charge probably don't even know Curacao isn't part of Venezuela.
With effectively no military and the Dutch government being an American lapdog, I doubt the people in charge need to care. They're already out there with orders to commit war crimes, shooting down an airliner or two that gets too close to their military aircraft wouldn't make much of a difference in the long run.
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Do they have possibility of receiving the civilian transponders ? Even if it was off they shoudld've picked different flight height...
Turning the transponder off only prevents civilian ATC from knowing your identification and altitude. They will still see your position as a primary target on their radar.
Trump doesn't understand the word "allied".
It's a tanker not a stealth fighter.
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> It's expected for military operations to fly without transponder
It's been a problem specifically with US military aircraft for years that they just wander into other people's airspace with transponders off and expect to have it all to themselves.
We should just start shooting down anything big enough to need a transponder that is not using one. Doesn't matter who's in it, doesn't matter what it's for.
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Because it’s flying near Venezuela, who we’re currently fucking with militarily.
The proper action then would be to declare war, and announce that the airspace is no longer safe for civilian use.
The whole "oh yes, our military is active, but we aren't at war, and yes, the president tweeted about that" spiel is just untenable and ridiculous.
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we wouldn’t be doing that, we voted for President that will end all the wars, not start new ones
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We? Seems like a personal vendetta from my perspective. I in no way shape or form want to send Americans to Venezuela for the holidays to start an armed conflict.
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Can’t you do it safely, with transponder on? It’s not like it will get softer or anything.
I believe the term of art de jour is “special military operation”
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Is it an inside joke I missed? 'Militarily' here and another comment had 'Bigly'. Is it a Trumpism?
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Common sense would dictate that a military aircraft conducting military operations off the coast of a hostile nation tend to not want to broadcast their position to the world. So not outrageous, just unfortunate. It's extremely common.
I’m sorry, which hostile nation?
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If you initiate a military conflict with another nation, the proper thing to do is to declare war first.
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On the other side it is perfectly visible on radar (and can be heard (and with jet having its own characteristic signature it can be tracked even by WWII microphone array like they did back then) and visible in binoculars from large distance in nice Caribbean weather), so it is hiding only from civilians. Security by obscurity kind of. That is especially so in the case of a slow large non-maneuvering tanker plane like here.
And why would a tanker plane come close to and even enter the hostile airspace?! may be one has to check Hegseth's Signal to get an answer for that, probably it is something like "big plane -> Scary!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mUbmJ1-sNs.
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> a national security operation
You answered your own question here.
Military planes doing military things always fly with their transponder off. It would be suicide not to.
Military planes often deliberately have them on; not every mission is secretive. You can often see NATO planes on FlightAware in the Black Sea clearly keeping an eye on the Ukraine theatre.
Example: https://flightaware.com/live/flight/FORTE10/history/20230821...
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The US could issue a notice of an Alert Area where military operations are in progress AND could coordinate with Dutch airspace authorities.
US AWACS has the capability to identify civilian aircraft and route military traffic well clear of civil traffic.
They could also not invade a country that did nothing to attack them, but I guess that’s asking too much.
Venezuela invaded the US by not selling the US oil at US terms
We can arrest Maduro for drug trafficking and then pardon him later for being set up by Biden.
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Notice was put out NOV
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/us_restrictions...
A sizable chunk of the world is currently considered hazardous for commercial aviation.[1] Ops.group maintains a quick reference map. It's bad.
[1] https://safeairspace.net/
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Yeah that's not for TNCF (curacao) but venezuela (SVZM) airspace. So that's approximately zero excuse.
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Delivered directly to your doorstep from the government of “no new wars”, guided by “peace president”.
Nothing says "no wars" than naming a minister of War
Hey, come on, you don't win a FIFA Peace Prize unless you absolutely deserve one.
US military planes & helis sure seem to be doing a lot of endangering people lately...and not the right ones
Being allies really doesn't mean anything anymore, does it?
I really wonder how long it will take to rebuild all these burned bridges.
What does allies have to do with this situation? Both aircraft involved were American.
Happened in Dutch Caribbean controlled Airspace
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Will the US ever get back to where they were, as the world's only superpower and "world police"?
I just don't see how we're going back.
unlikely, at least not during this generation. even putting aside the current admin, the US has (to put it extremely lightly) long failed to police its own and certain "allies'" behavior, which undermines the concept altogether.
at this point, there are unfortunately no "good guys" at the state level.
Someone has to prevent the execution of journalist who speak out against the regime and that has no due process and also have highest execution rate of any country. They labeled "Authoritarian state" by Amnesty International and Humans Rights Watch and "Systemic human-rights violator" by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Oh wait, i mixed up Saudi Arabia one of the US's closets allies with Venezuela.
generations
meh, bridges get constantly burned and rebuilt between allies and enemies both - just another day really
If a bridge gets built then destroyed, built then destroyed, built then destroyed and so on, people will stop using it. They'll also stop trusting the bridge builder.
You run into trouble if someone manages to set all of them on fire at once.
People all over the world are already building new bridges to places like China, so even if the old ones are rebuilt, they might get substantially less use.
I always get the impression that whenever military/police have the option to turn off ADS-B, they do. Not just in the US or by US forces. Not just on sensitive flights. I don't think the toggle ever gets used.
I'm no expert but I'd imagine they would mostly do this in areas where commercials airliners aren't?
Not really. I live next to an airport with both a civilian and military presence (and an alternate for a NATO airbase). The number of military/police flights that I can only see on MLAT is pretty worrying. I don't think BPol has ever turned their "stealth" switch off.
Nothing beats a JetBlue holiday
In other news, the National Defense Authorization Act working its way through congress is trying to loosen restrictions around DCA that were put in place after a military helicopter collided with a passenger jet.
> The Air Force jet then entered Venezuelan airspace, the JetBlue pilot said. "We almost had a mid-air collision up here."
They simply should stay the fuck away from that airspace then. And by that I don't mean JetBlue.
"Should" is a cute word. It does a lot of work, and accomplishes nothing.
"We should cure cancer." "I should exercise." "Nations should not torture people."
This perhaps isn't the lind of lethality the DoD has in mind.
So never fly in or out of DCA, and avoid anywhere near Venezuela.
Why is that?
This near miss plus that helicopter thing, I assume: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Potomac_River_mid-air_col...
Call me crazy, but I think any time, any where, without any exceptions whatsoever, someone wants to fly a multi-ton chunk of metal, they need to broadcast telemetry in a cleartext, open standard.
I understand that this might be disruptive to people who want to drop explosives on other people, and while this disruption is a fantastic benefit, it's only a side-effect.
To be sure, the relevant statutory regulation[1] didn't always read the way how it does.
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-F...
Yeah, exactly. I've been watching adsb activity over my house for years, and in the past few weeks, for the first time, I have activity (helicopter and jet) in my area that it not visible.
It's unnerving, and unbecoming of an egalitarian society.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46269601
We have the best mid-air collisions. Noone does it better, or so people tell me. We don't do sleepy silent disappearances over the Bermuda Triangle, that's SAD!! We blow em up, BIGLY, in someone else's airspace. A great PRESIDENT knows how to WIN at mid-air collisions. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Not nearly enough randomly capitalised words
Nah. That place is well deserved by Russia. But they have missile - plane collisions :)
Oh yes as if the Great US of A didn't shoot down passenger jets
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/july-3/u-s-warsh...
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The US is trying to one-up Russia on that by using another plane as the missile.
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Isn't this technically an act of war against the Netherlands?
Anything can be an act of war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Jenkins%27_Ear
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_War_(1859)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_War
Or we just make them up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Powell%27s_presentation_...
No, the Netherlands won't consider this to be anything of the sort.
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> Caribbean nation of Curacao
It's the first time I hear someone calls Curaçao a "nation". It's just the normal Dutch island, not even some special status territory. Yes, it's in Carribean, but why do they omit "Dutch" and call it a "Carribean nation"?
I find words in the same category as "country", "nation", "state", etc are increasingly used interchangeably. Largely because they tend to be far more specific than people mean to be... but also because generic terms like "polity" never caught on in the mainstream. A similar thing is how "nation-states" would appear to be the only type of place worth worrying about highly organized attacks from in infosec, until you ask them to define what they consider a nation-state.
That said, I don't think it's accurate to paint Curaçao as just another normal Dutch island the same as any other. It's really a constituent country that's part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, just not a sovereign state or a nation.
A nation-state is a state whose borders and (originally) citizenship are largely defined by a singular nationality. Israel and Japan, for example. Belgium and Canada are not nation states: they are split into French and Flemish, and Anglo and French nationalities, respectively.
It is a 19th century term that rarely applies these days, but still sees some residual usage.
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It's hard to use them consistently because there isn't a single universally accepted definition.
Most people would consider the Netherlands a "country", but now we have a country within that country. Israel is a state, Japan is a state, but there are 50 states in the United States. "[People's] Republic of XYZ" generally refers to a sovereign state, but Russia has republics inside. You can't just call something what the locals call it and expect that your readers will get the picture. Even worse, people are often deeply divided as to what a given territory should be called.
So I will generally forgive journalists for picking a neutral-sounding, ambiguous expression in cases like this. What matters here is that the Dutch control this airspace, regardless of Curaçao's status within their kingdom.
Lots of small islands have similar status, for example The Cayman Islands, Bermuda & Puerto Rico.
I'm a state actor because I always remember my lines when I go up on stage.
It's not part of the country the Netherlands anymore. They voted to leave.
They're still in the kingdom which means they're not completely on their own but nation is a good word.
Curacao has been a country that is part of the kingdom of the Netherlands since 2010.
technically, it's a country within the Kingdom :)
the bigger question is: what business does the Netherlands have all the way across the ocean in an island? Who gave them the "right" to own it?
What do you mean "all the way across the ocean". From where? The distance from Curaçao to the Dutch people is exactly zero.
What "right" are you talking about, is there an agency where we file a claim, and it issues us "rights"?
All people from all nations, tribes and states came from somewhere, sometimes even replacing the local population. Sometimes peacefully, like Anglo-Saxons pushed out local Britons in England, sometimes violently, like Normans invaded and conquered England.
Or like the rich and diverse American Indian history -- tribes came and went, sometimes replaced, pushed out, conquered or assimilated with previous peoples who lived there. Please define "right".
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We didn't have the right, obviously, but it has happened and we need to deal with the current situation. And the Netherlands has offered them sovereignty multiple times in the last fifty years, they can leave anytime they want. But nowadays they want to stay in the kingdom, mostly because it offers them some security and stability.
The same business the US has in Guam or Puerto Rico, the UK in the Bahamas etc. It was a colony. They decided to become independent but still part of the kingdom of the Netherlands which was their choice. So the current status is such because the people of Curacao have decided they wanted it this way.
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You could pick up a history textbook and find out.
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Not sure I’d call crossing traffic “within a few miles” a near-miss. Even at full cruising speed of 500-600MPH (less because the JetBlue was still on a climb) the civilian aircraft would cover a mile in 6-7 seconds, so we are talking 18 to 24 seconds to close 3-4 miles.
Also, it a common for military aircraft to not have a transponder on, especially in the vicinity of threats. Without a transponder the civilian aircraft TCAS/ACAS would not warn about traffic.
Not sure how far off the coast of Venezuela this occurred, but there are some very real SAM threats the Air Force aircraft would need to worry about.
(edited typos)
Large aircraft take a while to avoid collisions due to their size and both jets are in motion. So this could have been within 5-10 seconds of a collision depending on specifics. The critical issue is the civilian aircraft “took evasive action on Friday to avoid a mid-air collision with a U.S. Air Force tanker plane near Venezuela, a pilot said in an air traffic control recording.”
Which needs to be reported as it then can impact other air traffic to avoid further issues.
If both craft took the same evasive action? Still could be a collison. A few seconds is so little to play with.
Even if the military plane had its transponder off, the civilian plane didn't. The military pilot had no justification for not knowing the civilian plane was there and at a minimum adjusting its altitude to make this a non issue.
And the tanker was likely supervised from an AWACS aircraft that probably should’ve flagged this, too.
> Not sure I’d call crossing traffic “within a few miles” a near-miss. Even at full cruising speed of 500-600MPH (less because the JetBlue was still on a climb) the civilian aircraft would cover a mile in 6-7 seconds, so we are talking 18 to 24 seconds to close 3-4 miles.
Sweet, so they've got less than half a minute to avoid a collision.
> Not sure how far off the coast of Venezuela this occurred
64km off the coast of Venezuela.
> Also, it a common for military aircraft to not have a transponder on
Is it actually common for military aircrafts with transponders off to mix and match with public traffic in activate flight regions? One would think if there is threats somewhere, they'd first mark the region as restricted, so no public airplanes go there in the first place, then they can fly without the transponders.
> Is it actually common for military aircrafts with transponders off to mix and match with public traffic in activate flight regions?
As a pilot, I can tell you it happens all the time. Even in US domestic airspace. Transponder use is optional for the military, and they will turn them off for some training missions. (Or in this case, a real mission.)
No, they don't close the airspace when this is being done.
The pilots of both aircraft (civilian and military) are supposed to be keeping a constant visual watch for traffic. The military aircraft should also be keeping an eye on primary radar.
(Transponder use is also optional for some civilian aircraft, btw.)
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If the positioning [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUcs1LCjhcs) is at all close to accurate, that looks closer to 300km, with the entirety of Aruba between them & the closest point in Venezuela. (Or all of Curaçao, but I think that line is longer.)
(TFA does say 64 km, though.)
Edit: I'm not sure about 64 km. The 64km is for the Curaçao departing flight, but Curaçao's airport is itself 80 km from Venezuela, and they headed north pretty immediately? I.e., … they would have never been < 80 km…?
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Threats are not to civilian aircraft. If conflict occurs areas would become restricted.
> Not sure I’d call crossing traffic “within a few miles” a near-miss.
Generally, from what I can find, the FAA definition is <500ft, so no, a few miles is potentially an issue, but not what would generally be categorized as a near miss unless there is some situational wrinkle that applies here.
The Air Force is probably used to flying much closer to one another, but civilians are not. Even in a busy airspace, jet airliners are usually kept apart >1000ft vertically, and much more horizontally in the direction they're moving. These birds can fly 500ft in less than 1 second after all.
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Well common enroute separation is 5NM so in aviation, it's close.
Is there a NOTAM for military traffic on this area?
The FAA did warn about military ops in the area. Good question; not sure they issued a NOTAM.
What if it was dark, or cloudy? Or the pilots weren't looking outside?
> there are some very real SAM threats the Air Force aircraft would need to worry about
The US Air Force should /absolutely/ be worried about Venezuela fighting back, with SAMs or otherwise. This military action and potential war is a travesty and the whole world should condemn and ostracize the USA immediately.