MarmiteLover123 [comrade/them, comrade/them]

I would say that the deviation could be explained be the pilots trying to regain some control over the aircraft after being hit, or simply turning away from their intended destination of Grozny after being fired upon. I don’t know if it would be possible for the pilots to make any kind of controlled turn given their situation (damaged/inoperable control surfaces and relying on the engines to control the aircraft) without losing a significant amount of altitude, potentially over the Caspian Sea. So they could just be focusing on keeping it straight and level for as long as possible, until they were over land again or lost too much altitude to continue flying and were forced into a crash landing. Either way the pilots are heroes for managing to crash land in such a way that some people could survive. Landing this and coming out with the end result of 20+ survivors is incredible.

Looking at the currently available evidence, I’d say that it’s highly likely that Russian forces, either air defences, or fighter patrols or escorts, mistakenly shot down Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243. GPS jamming is not the cause of this. There are entry and exit holes in the fuselage even visible from inside of the aircraft, part of the left wing was missing, and the vertical stabiliser was shredded like a piece of Swiss cheese. It was likely hit by a missile (not an oxygen canister or internal bomb, those are very unlikely to end up inside the vertical stabiliser), and only Russia has the capabilities in that location. They were either aiming at a Ukrainian drone close to the civilian airliner and the missile unintentionally tracked the civilian airliner or exploded in close proximity to it, or there was a case of mistaken identity and the civilian airliner was shot at directly. The detour could just be the pilots trying to regain control after the aircraft was hit, with damaged control surfaces and relying on the engine power to keep the aircraft stable and controllable.

The Azerbaijan Airlines flight was operating near the Caspian Sea, and Russian bombers often perform cruise missile launch maneuveres over the Caspian Sea, and will be accompanied by fighter escorts and patrols. A Russian cruise missile attack on Ukraine took place shortly beforehand.

Then there’s the fact that Grozny was under attack by Ukrainian UAVs at the time, including remotely piloted Cessna aircraft filled with explosives, potentially giving out civilian IFF codes, and Russian air defences were active.

This incident, combined with the US Navy shooting down their own F/A-18F aircraft, and narrowly missing another, with the use of SM-2 surface to air missiles equipped with a terminal infrared (IR) heat seeker according to sources in the US Navy that gave information to US news outlets, should show that IFF is not some magic forcefield that prevents the shoot down of friendly or civilian aircraft, and that missiles can easily track unintended targets with improper fire control. I would do a write up on how the different types of missiles work and their guidance with regards to that, but that would take a lot of time, so I’ll just link this write-up on the subject here. It’s a good summary regardless of the source.

There is no such thing as posting too much, keep posting. Christmas is now over for me and I haven’t been on here, or any social media, during the holiday, so the more information the better.

Not new unfortunately, the topics of nuclear weapons and depleted uranium have been bringing out the cranks for ages.

Another ballistic missile, or multiple missiles, from Yemen was fired at Israel last night, with high altitude interceptions visible. Not exoatmospheric as that would produce a bluish to purple tinted explosion and not the orange explosion seen on video, but high altitude within the atmosphere. There were videos of the interception and debris falling down.

Video of interception

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Video of debris

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I’m hoping against hope for a ceasefire by Christmas or New Years. The suffering has to stop eventually…

Apparently it was a bunch of Uzbek fighters that couldn’t even speak proper Arabic that ended up burning the Christmas tree.

The only positive that could come out of this is some new sportscars. New Nissan GTR and Honda S2000 when?

I just checked, the search feature is disabled on his profile and all tweets older than a few months have been removed. Doesn’t appear to be a targeted removal, just removing everything over a certain age and disabling search so you can’t find the older posts. Last post visible is from November 12 2024. Could be a “convenient coincidence” if those older posts were more explicitly anti Islam or pro Israel, or in support of Elon Musk or the AFD. There are plenty of anti Islam, pro Elon Musk, and pro Israel posts still visible though.

If an hostile drone pops up in one of those corridors close to friendly aircraft, and it’s fired upon, could it be possible for a friendly aircraft to get caught in the crossfire, with either a terminal active radar seeker or terminal infrared heat seeker locking onto the friendly aircraft instead of the hostile drone? I don’t think those terminal seekers are connected to IFF, which is why a lot of these missile systems involve using both the semi active radar homing (which is connected to IFF) alongside the active radar or infrared seekers (not connected to IFF) for terminal guidance. That’s my hypothesis at the moment, that Ansarallah exploited something there after the F/A-18F took off.

Either that, or someone on the missile cruiser left the CIWS on fully automatic operation by mistake, after being shot at by missiles and drones, and it lit up the F/A-18F right after takeoff. As far as I’m aware, CIWS is not connected to IFF.

Interested to know what you think of this.

Yeah it’s a valid tactic for sure, engineering a situation that causes your adversary to shoot down their own aircraft. Some impressive surveillance, co-ordination and planning must have gone into such an attack by the Yemeni Armed Forces, using their capabilities to the maximum.

Remember what Mohammed Ali al-Houthi said earlier this year:

The heroes in the Yemeni armed forces know about the loopholes that can be exploited by synchronizing the take-off or landing of American aircraft on the ships. I advise the American and its allies to issue a decision not to take off at all.

It seems as if the loophole was used, considering that the Americans claim that the aircraft was shot down after take off.

Statement from Ansarallah on last night’s operations against the US Navy.

Statement implies that the US shot down their own aircraft while trying to intercept cruise missiles and drones. Impressive military operation by the Yemeni Armed Forces. I wondered why they didn’t fire any ballistic missiles last night, this seems to be the reason why, they wanted to confuse the US Navy with targets that can appear similar to an aircraft. Maybe even shadowing one? Either way, they succeeded in causing a chaotic situation that lead to the downing of a US F/A-18F aircraft. That is impressive. May Ansarallah continue in their operations to dissuade the imperialists and defend Palestine.

Twitter source

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Just going to add a tweet that Mohammed Ali al-Houthi made on the 8th March 2024, I think it fits in nicely given the current situation:

The heroes in the [Yemeni] armed forces know about the loopholes that can be exploited by synchronizing the take-off or landing of American aircraft on the battleships.
I advise the American and their ally to issue a decision not to take off at all.

It seems as if the “loophole” was used. The Americans were warned, they were told what would happen months in advance, and it happened. 1 F/A-18F down.

Mohammed Ali al-Houthi tweet

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In one way I’m glad some of them aren’t on here to see this and having to deal with our stupid arguments, the last few weeks have just been really bad. They’re probably feeling the same emotions we are feeling times a hundred, and way more complicated and nuanced, as they actually live there and have a personal attachment to their country. Imagine commenting on and correctly predicting the downfall of you and/or your loved ones’ country, for example. And then seeing people, maybe even someone you know being freed from prisions. And then the country gets bombed by a powerful adversary. In another scenario, imagine returning to your homeland after months of bombings, after a ceasefire agreement gets singed (no matter how bad the terms, a ceasefire is a ceasefire). That’s extremely emotional. Being on the internet and arguing with a bunch of people (mostly westerners) who didn’t even know what the SAA, 1974 agreement, the blue line, South Litani area, HTS, SNA, SDF, etc, were until a few weeks ago is probably not the best course of action in such a scenario.

I’ll keep on reporting until the end, no matter how bad it gets, someone has to do it after all. Or good, never give up hope comrades, even in the worst hours, we have to be resilient, there is no other choice.

Syrian air defence systems don’t really exist anymore, they’re either in HTS’ hands, or being destroyed by Israel. Russia is withdrawing so they’ll want to stay out of this.

Erdogan: 'Besides Putin, I am the only real leader left in the entire world.

He wants to join the hexbear “adventurers” club apparently lol. Someone on here said this a few days ago:

There are just three adventurers left in the world, Netanyahu, MBZ and Putin.

But yeah Erdogan is going to be playing this up big time.

They carpet bombed them with B-52 bombers, apparently one site had over 140 bombs dropped on it. B-52, A-10 and F-15E aircraft used. 75 targets total according to CENTCOM.

By the time Aleppo completely fell, which had never happened before, and the SAA abandoned/donated half their equipment to HTS on the withdrawal to Hama, the writing was on the wall.

The biggest surprise was Hama holding out for a few days, and it appears that only happend to buy time for Russia, Iran, and Assad government elites to negotiate their withdrawal. Then we got the worst “counter-offensive” in history by the SAA, when everyone was wondering if HTS was overstretched, it was actually the SAA overstretching themselves and having the other half of their equipment captured by HTS. Made the infamous Ukrainian “counter-offensive” look like a 10/10 military operation by comparison.

Then there was the cope about paratroopers going to save Hama and Homs in an attack that never materialised, then cope that Iran would intervene somehow, then the Syrian minister of defence turning into Baghdad Bob with his ridiculous speeches and statements.

Then we had the rebels take all the provincial capitals, and the evacuation flights started taking place. Damascus finally falls, the last plane out of Damascus disappears from radar (wonder what happened to it, Assad wasn’t on it most likely, but did it crash, did it jam it’s transponder, was it shot down, who knows), the US starts watching all of this with their spy planes, Iran flies every evacuation flight to Latakia over Al Tanf airspace, in what appears to be some kind of negotiated withdrawal and safety for these flights.

Then Israel invades the Golan (I know I’m a broken record at this point, but Jolani giving the Jolan to Israel is just something out of a Sacha Baron Cohen film), Israel bombs all the leftover equipment from the SAA, Netanyahu makes another unhinged speech, and now we learn Assad’s family have asylum in Moscow. Not even the UAE would take him.

It’s been a long week…

But yes very much shocked, not Syrian but being following this conflict since the beginning. I went to high school with someone whose family fled Syria because of the war (and ended up in South Africa somehow), I wonder how they are feeling. I never talked to them much, and certainly not about Syria or politics. Hopefully one day all those imprisoned by Israel for fighting for freedom will be free.

After Aleppo fell, it became clear that Assad had no real intentions of staying in power, so we started to engage in diplomatic talks with the opposition, and arranged the safe exit of our troops from Syria.

It looks like the only reason the SAA held Hama for so long (long being a few days) was to facilitate this and buy time to negotiate and plan the exit. The Russians and Iranians probably forced them to do this. Once the SAA was left to it’s own devices, the collapse continued.