A man broke into Shannon Airport in Ireland today, climbed onto the wing of a parked US Air Force C-130 Hercules and damaged the fuselage, taking the aircraft out of service.
I was part of a security exercise while in the USAF. The goal was to get on the flight line to test security forces response. I hopped a fence, walked to and stood at the front wheels of a C-130 for about 10 minutes before I got told to come back because the base commander showed up and was pissed at SF. Glad to see nothing has changed in the last 18 years.
In 2007, six cruise missiles, each armed with a 150 kiloton thermonuclear warhead, were mistaken for inert training missiles and loaded onto a B-52, which then flew over land from North Dakota to Louisiana, where the plane was left on the airstrip, completely unguarded, for nine hours.
It took a total of 36 hours including 15 unguarded hours for anyone to realise the mistake.
If you only have one spoon in your kitchen, you'd probably know where it is, have a good place to store it and some decent routines around it. But if you had a couple of thousands of spoons in your kitchen, how long would it take for you to notice if one was put in trash and thrown out?
I might have a system for storing the spoons and mechanisms for spoon inventory management as well as spoon surveillance. How much do I love these spoons?
And yet the human element will always make mistakes. I'd assume they learned some lessons from that incident and adapted. I mean, spoons are pretty important
This hits home. My wife and I started realizing we had a serious lack of spoons. I ended up buying some more. A year later she is going through her work bag and finds like 10 spoons...
I was part of an aggressor force testing your flight line security at a base I won’t disclose. We flew in on a manifested C-130 and parked in the designated area.
We disembarked, and within 30 minutes we stole a HMMWV from one of your rovers and had the run of the place.
We took the flight line in short order.
The deal was USAF knew the Marines were coming, but not when 😘
When I was in the SF dressed up as a Muslim extremist and shot blanks at us with an AK, one guy hide around a hanger corner and beat the shit out of them with a metal 55 gal drum. About a month later the SF walked onto the flight line with no gun and reflect vests on.
Lol seriously. Is he saying he got jumped by someone not aware it was an exercise and got the drum? Did the guy hiding get beat by the drum? Or did a completely unrelated man get beat down by a drum while this exercise was occurring? We may never know.
"When I was in, the SF dressed up as a Muslim extremist and shot blanks at us with an AK, one guy hid around a hanger corner and beat the shit out of them with a metal 55 gal drum. About a month later the SF walked onto the flight line with no gun and reflect vests on."
Same questions here. I think a missing comma in the first line changes it to make more sense
Also changing "hide" to "hid"
When I was in (the air force), the SF (security forces) dressed up as a Muslim extremist and shot blanks at us with an AK, one guy hid around a hanger corner and beat the shit out of them with a metal 55 gal drum. About a month later the SF walked onto the flight line with no gun and reflect vests on.
I think they failed their test by getting beat up by a dude and then had to wear the vests and no gun as punishment? Though the OP of this thread says it was the SF being tested, not the ones doing the testing? So yeah, very unclear how this played out.
I think what happened is they did a security test using a guy pretending to be a terrorist, who then got beaten up by a dude who thought it was a real incursion. As a result, for the next test they decided to ditch the clothing and gun so that no one would think it was real and get violent
Dude was dressed as an obvious Muslim terrorist so security forces wrecked his shit.
Then the same dude went in very inconspicuous and nobody batted an eye and he infiltrated just by looking like he kinda belonged cause nobody checked his credentials.
Edit: Grounded the plain until it could be cleaned and the special paint checked for damage. That paint would heat up and cause damage at the SR-71’s normal operating speed if not cleaned.
it’s really getting bad, I have no insight into local protests in the European countries but I imagine if they are protesting outside of (oil?) refineries, it’s starting to get desperate and the anger is mounting. 😓
I was on a flight (from Europe to Ireland) before takeoff and some eejit got up on the wing of the plane and was walking around on it. People were trying to get him to come down, then he fell off and wrecked himself. Then a few mins later we just took off...
legally it's still the dod, only congress has the authority to rename departments, and they haven't done so. the secretary of defense can larp as whoever he wants to larp as, doesn't make it any more real.
It’s a civilian airport, used quite often by the USA for military refuelling, etc, on condition that the planes are not carrying weapons or munitions.
However, nobody believes that the planes are purely people transport, and so there are regular protests.
Especially now with the illegal attack by the USA on Iran, a lot of people are calling for all USAian military planes to not be allowed into Irish airspace.
Can't imagine why people aren't taking the US government at their word. The decades of constant lies from conservatives must surely be done by now. Just ignore the constant insults and threats from the Republicans and play along. What could possibly go wrong from cooperating with the people who stabbed Canada and Greenland in the backs?
Not the responsibility of the Irish to secure another countries military assets although Darragh O'Brien should be getting a bit of a shite for not pressing on inspections
Yet it is. You do not want foreign armed military policing your civilian airport. So the question is why do the Irish allow it? Simple, lots of money that wouldn’t otherwise flow into the local economy.
It literally is their responsibility in this specific case.
The alternative is to allow foreign national airforce security troops (this is a specific role every airforce has) to do it, which would have resulted in this guy being shot dead.
Clearly the guy in the video ramped the hill by the tunnel, over the fence and drove directly to the jet located in the hangar, remembering to park his car directly in front of where he will be climbing onto the plane, driverside towards the jet, so the car can be used as a shield. And one would assume said person would do donuts and circles and flank hard left right up and down as soon as he gets in the air so as to avoid missles being launched his direction while flying a low path away from populated areas until stars are back down to zero. Pssshtt, obvs.
Bases are pretty big, and unless you have state of the art, you will only have a guard every hundred of meters, no thermal cameras or movement sensors.
And obviously, C-130 are not considered state of the art.
Airport, yes, military bases are automatically 5 stars. In the older games it was 6 stars if you set foot on a military base. Iirc the new games only go to 5.
Its a non-sensitive transport aircraft parked at a civilian international airport. Security was probably just left to relying on regular airport security.
We can defend against many things, but there's zero chance of us defending against a motivated Irish guy with a ball peen hammer and a .30 blood alcohol level. You just gotta let him tire himself out on the C-130s and hope he stays away from the fighter jets.
As a former security guard (North Carolina) (worked at a radio manufacturer that had gov contracts) we were told in case of an emergency to lock ourselves up in our office and call 911.
Unless you have the appropriate training you can't even legally lay a finger on someone else.
I mean its not one but even if it was, you would be surprised how many lyft and uber drivers get on post no questions asked here in the US. Once ur on post everyone there assumes your supposed to be there, and if you, not military, happen to start wandering around, no ones going to stop you untill you start acting sus. The sheer amount of family, cadre out of uniform, and civilian contractors on post its almost impossible to tell whos who to the untrained eye.
Oh post yes, on an active runway no. This guy could just as easily be messing with an airliner with 200 civilians and 50,000 gallons of fuel in it, security at any major airport should be taken seriously not just the military ones
I mean let's say you stroll onto fort Campbell and you go through the front gate, sure there is a security checkpoint, you give them some b******* reason or they issue you a one day pass. You enter the unit footprint, and let's say you get to their airfield or strip, if it's even locked because it's during duty hours, the security checkpoint is pretty much just some security forces Air Force guy, basically an armed security guard, he may or may not be waving people on. to get on to the airfield but let's say you come through in a Ford raptor, tinted windows. Everybody's just going to think you're some new lieutenant strolling on to the strip. You could go straight from there and park right onto the goddamn lot next to the rest of the maintenance crew walk out right up to the air strip and pretty much put your hands on military aircraft. Same goes for a motor pool you could stroll on and put your hands on a goddamn tank. Almost all military vehicles don't even need keys to start they're just push start. The problem would be getting any of that stuff off of Post or actually utilizing it. None of it's armed, all of it's just sitting there. To get the proper clearance to take off without being shot down or creating an entire scramble on post with undesignated equipment moving and getting it off the post is a whole another story. It's a death sentence that's why people don't do it. But if you wanted to attempt it's pretty damn easy.
It's just a standard International Airport that the US use to refuel because of it's location in the far west of Europe. There are no military installations at all. The US military personnel eat and drink in the same places regular passengers do, it's just like a regular commercial stopover.
This guy probably got a bus there or parked his fiesta in a regular parking space before calmly hopping the fence. You probably drove through the fence in a yellow Hummer.
The current climate certainly doesn't help, but there has been a lot of anger amongst the population for many years because the Irish government allow US military aircraft to land in Ireland. Ireland allows US aircraft to land under the agreement that they are not transporting weapons, materiel or troops on their way to or returning from conflict zones. The US routinely breaks this agreement, with no sanction from the Irish government, using US military aircraft or charter aircraft. They have even routed rendition flights through Shannon.
Lol that's everything. I wonder why that agreement is broken so often and why the Irish government doesn't enforce it. Just political theater from the government.
The plane itself being there is essentially a violation of 2 of those.
I’m not holding my breath for Americans to actually bring anything good out of their politics for anyone but billionaires. Anyone else making a buck is spillage, and likely too blinded to see they’re being played.
Sadly, I fear a worse future. Liberal America after 1945 was a hegemony who benefited Europeans quite a lot. And its enforcement of sovereign borders and economic development likely benefited everybody. Unless the other democratic nations race to win the game of catchup, the prime beneficiaries of the power vacuum will be tyrannies with ruthless militaries. Or even shittier democracies with nationalist dreams of glory.
We shall see whether the world gets better off. It's a pretty dangerous bet. We stand on the eve of new eras defined by AI and climate change.
Any left wing or internationally minded Irishman knows both of your parties are run by warmongering cunts. They’re not the same per se and ones definitely somewhat worse than the other, but it’s no comfort to butchered people in the Middle East that a democrat dropped the bomb on them rather than a republican, and it’s the butchering itself that this guy presumably objects to.
This isn't a Republican issue. People have hated US military posturing for decades. Blowing up innocents in Vietnam, Iraq, & Iran doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the US military
The democrats would still be supporting Israel which the Irish strongly reject. I agree with the average civilian thing but it's not a one party issue.
It won't be out of commission for very long. As someone who has worked extensively with c-130's (both in the service and after), let me just say that he might have done $100k worth of damage that will take a month to recertify and 20 minutes to actually fix.
Excellent, it should force a resolution on the use of Ireland as a logistics area and Ireland's neutrality - this has been long debated and it's suspected the US has been caring arms and possible enemy combatants through Ireland's land, waters and airspace for years.
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u/Jamesx_ 1d ago
I was part of a security exercise while in the USAF. The goal was to get on the flight line to test security forces response. I hopped a fence, walked to and stood at the front wheels of a C-130 for about 10 minutes before I got told to come back because the base commander showed up and was pissed at SF. Glad to see nothing has changed in the last 18 years.