Those ‘doomsday planes’ have nothing to do with Trump’s Covid-19 test

Minutes before the president Donald Trump tweeted on Friday morning that he and first lady Melania Trump had tested positive for Covid-19, two Boeing E-6B Mercury jets appeared in public flight data, one charting a course off the east coast of the United States. United States and another the west coast. Even in times of pandemic, there is nothing unusual about seeing aircraft on these types of routes at night, but the E-6Bs are not normal commercial aircraft. They are used to send ballistic missile commands.

After news broke Thursday that Trump’s adviser Hope Hicks had tested positive for the new coronavirus, aircraft observers and social media. forecasters established a connection with the E-6Bs they saw take off. Perhaps, they suggested, it was an indication that Trump had tested positive, and during this delicate moment, the United States Strategic Command was working to send a message of deterrence to its adversaries. The idea went viral, increasing confusion and fear about the implications of Trump’s diagnosis.

The truth is, while they are exceptionally interesting aircraft, E-6Bs regularly take off, fly, and land as part of the US missile defense apparatus – they should be ready at any moment, so they are.

“I can confirm that these flights were pre-planned missions,” US Strategic Command chief of media operations Karen Singer told WIRED on Friday.

The E-6Bs, which are based on the Boeing 707s, are essentially communications relay stations built to receive military orders from the US president and the secretary of defense, and then transmit those commands to ballistic missile submarines. They are also equipped to remotely control Minuteman ICBMs via a platform called the Airborne Launch Control System. The idea is that the E-6Bs serve as redundancy in case the terrestrial communications systems are interrupted. And they’re also crucial for establishing line-of-sight communication connections that require proximity. The E-6B mission is generally known as TACAMO, or Take Charge And Move Out.

“These planes take off all the time, I certainly didn’t draw any conclusions from them,” says Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Non-Proliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies in Monterey, California.

Airplanes have some dramatic capabilities. One of the most important is its very low frequency communication platform, which is used to reach nuclear ballistic missile submarines up to 60 feet below the ocean surface. These stealthy subs must conceal their positions and are often unable to rise to shallower depths or send buoys to facilitate communication. Instead, both communications relay aircraft and the submarines themselves must be equipped with massive antennas, and even then, VLF systems still have extremely low latency, low bandwidth, and low throughput, which means they are it takes a long time to send very small amounts of data.

To transmit even the shortest messages to deep-sea submarines, the E-6Bs perform special maneuvers in the air. These are essentially tight, steep turns that go on for long periods of time circling the plane so that the antennas are upright and transmit directly into the water. Other military aircraft are also equipped for VLF communication, but it is especially critical to the E-6B mission.

Although E-6Bs do not fly constantly as part of the Strategic Command Airborne Command Post, its predecessor aircraft, the Air Force EC-135, was part of a mission that had at least one aircraft in the air at all times for more than 29 years from February 3, 1961 to July 24, 1990. Coverage may not be as consistent today, but readiness exercises are still extremely common.

“On a day-to-day basis, people don’t think about the fact that the United States is in a position to use more than 1,000 nuclear weapons just minutes in advance,” says Lewis of the Middlebury Institute. “They just don’t think about it, because it seems crazy. So when something happens and people look and see the normal level of preparedness, they think to themselves, ‘My God, this must be a catastrophe, because why? Are all these forces on alert ?! But Trump got sick didn’t cause this, that’s the way it is all the time. And if you don’t like that, then maybe it’s a conversation to have. “

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