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'Unprecedented Mass Deployment' of Warplanes Across Atlantic Fuels Fears of US War on Iran
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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This has to be a bluff. That many military planes with their transponders on. I think they're just trying to send a message.
First, they are probably actually participating in this annual training exercise: https://www.europeafrica.army.mil/Defender/
They have to run transponders over the US so that commercial aircraft know their position and don't collide. Once they leave our airspace, (or in special circumstances where the airspace is cleared) they will run without. These are just basically civilian transponders they run to "be polite" - they are also filtered by most flight tracking sites. Some (such as the one pictured) allow one to look at the raw data (and likewise you can run an SDR transponder receiver yourself at home to see what aircraft are over you.)
Sometimes they will bluff the transponder value and say things like, "hey I'm a Cessna going 400 knots" but most of the time they just say who they are.
Fun fact! The transponders don't work over the oceans anyway, since there's nobody on the surface to pick them up, you're basically a ghost once you leave land, (surrounding aircraft can see each other, however) think about that during your next trans-ocean flight. They increasingly have satellite Internet these days to have some form of comms, though.
Nah, that exercise only involves a handful of KC-135s. We're seeing 30+ KC-46 Pegasus and KC-135 Stratotankers being strategically redeployed. This is something else.
We were also running transponders on tankers even when they were refueling aircraft around Ukraine (albeit in friendly airspace).
The refuelled aircraft (at least some of which were F-35s, if not all, as someone geolocated a picture during the conflict) were not running transponders, though (and in the case of the picture of the F-35, had the radar reflectors removed).
Military transport and refueling planes often fly with their transponders on, that's not unusual. Combat aircraft, not so much.
It says Air Force refueling planes so technically not war planes. Not a chance actual military planes are trackable.
They are still military airplanes.
I live near a big refueling base in the US and the tankers are usually trackable. Ditto for military cargo planes, Orions, and military passenger planes.
What happens when they're on their way to active deployments ... that I don't know.
Flight plans for these day they are going to Europe. A bluff doesn’t really make sense in the context. Most likely we will assist Israel in controlling the airspace around Iran.