This was the single most dangerous moment for B-2 pilots during their Iran bombing raid
The B-2 Spirit bombers that obliterated Iranian nuclear facilities in Operation Midnight Hammer were exposed to grave danger in the most pivotal moment during the 25-minute operation in airspace over the Islamic Republic.
The seven stealth bombers carried 14 30,000-pound GBU-57 'bunker buster' bombs for more than 18 hours after they were deployed from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri just after midnight and crossed the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea to reach Iran.
But as pilots moved to drop their explosive payloads on three Iranian nuclear sites at 6:40 p.m. Saturday, the planes were at risk of losing their stealth capabilities and exposing themselves to enemy fire, The New York Times reported.
Advertisement
This B-2 Spirit bomber, in a 2018 exercise, shows the exact moment a payload is released and the plane loses some of its stealth capabilities.
US Air Force
When the two-person crews released their weapons bay doors to drop the bombs, the shape of the stealth craft changed and made them more likely to pop up on Iranian radar — exposing the daring pilots to potentially deadly counterfire.
Experienced B-2 pilots told the outlet that the tense moment was punctuated by the aircraft quickly rising up into the air as it dropped the explosives, which weigh 15 tons apiece.
Advertisement
The ace pilots operating the B-2s on Saturday were able to navigate the risk and successfully hit their targets — the deeply embedded nuclear enrichment site Fordow, as well as facilities in Natanz, and Isfahan, which had previously been targeted by Israel.
US submarines further buttressed the attack with more than two dozen Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles that struck Isfahan.
The seven Spirits were then out of Iranian airspace by 7:30 p.m. on Saturday and on their way back to Missouri to complete the 37-hour non-stop flight.
Two pilots sit in the cockpit of a B-2 — a $2 billion plane of which the United States has 19.
U.S. Air Force
Advertisement
Pilots likely ran simulations of the difficult route in the days and weeks leading up to the actual bombing, the Times reported.
Those pilots did have some amenities on the Midnight flight — including a microwave, a refrigerator, and a bathroom.
The two-person crews also took turns lying down and resting — but both were required to be in the cockpit for take-off and all time spent in Iranian airspace.
Advertisement
As part of Midnight Hammer, the Trump administration launched a decoy convoy of B-2s to the Middle East by way of the Pacific Ocean, with a planned refueling in Guam.
The US Air Force has a fleet of 19 B-2 bombers, the most expensive plane in history, after losing one in a crash in 2008.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Business Insider
2 days ago
- Business Insider
Behind the scenes of a B-2 bomber strike: How crews prep for hard missions like 'Midnight Hammer'
Pilots and crews prepare for missions with complex practice and scenario planning. Crews have to work through what happens if their plan falls apart. For B-2 bombers, that means training for contingencies, learning how to manage fatigue, and simulating long flights. The bomber pilots who flew over Iranian airspace or whose aircraft served as decoys during this past weekend's Operation Midnight Hammer strikes on Iran's nuclear program didn't pull this complex mission off on the fly. It was a highly secretive and challenging mission that would have depended heavily on extensive planning and training. That the B-2s involved, per the Pentagon's account, dropped massive 15-ton bunker-busters one after another down an exhaust shaft at the Fordow nuclear site speaks to the precision required. Business Insider talked to retired US Air Force B-2 pilots about what it takes to prepare for difficult missions where stress and fatigue can easily take their toll on the bomber crews. Retired Air Force Colonel Brian "Jethro" Neal was one of two pilots to fly the longest-ever B-2 flight in 2001, just weeks after the 9/11 attacks. He and fellow pilot Melvin Deaile clocked in a 44-hour flight complete with over half a dozen aerial refuelings and a last-minute change of plans that sent them to drop more bombs. How do pilots and air support personnel prepare for such arduous missions? Neal said the key is constant practice and having a clear plan for when things go south. "No plan survives first contact with the enemy," Neal told BI, repeating a common phrase among US service members rooted in the writings of a 19th-century Prussian field marshal. It refers to the expectation of chaos with combat and the need to be ready when that moment comes. "So we have plans, we have back-ups to the plans, the plan B, and plan C," the former bomber pilot said. It takes a village His entire unit sprang into action upon learning B-2s would be deployed to fly bombing runs into Afghanistan. That meant groups of civilian government workers, pilots, aircraft maintainers, and airfield managers quickly gathering in planning groups and sharing intelligence to start deciding which targets would be struck and what it would take to achieve success. Northrop Grumman's B-2 Spirit bomber is a sophisticated $2 billion plane built to slip past enemy air defenses undetected and drop either conventional or nuclear payloads on an enemy. The aircraft is built to deliver tremendous devastation, and it takes a village to get just one of these aircraft in the air, Neal said. A bomber unit's mission planning process is painstakingly detailed and involves walking through numerous scenarios, identifying pitfalls or tricky enemy defenses to work around, and incorporating key intelligence assessments flowing from multiple avenues to pinpoint what the plan and contingencies should look like. While top brass and pilots are deep in staff planning, aircraft maintainers are getting planes ready and verifying with planners the right amount of fuel a bomber should carry and how much air should be in the tires. That corresponds directly with the payload size, which is mainly about the weight of the munitions on board. Meanwhile, the air control tower is working to make sure the stage is set for military aircraft take-offs and landings. They are "coordinating and orchestrating traffic in the air to make sure they're going the right way at the right time," Neal said. Neal recalled the munitions specialists who regularly inspected scores of Joint Direct Attack Munitions, unguided bombs fitted with a GPS-guidance kit. A B-2 carries anywhere between 16 to 80 of these weapons, depending on the munition's weight. Then there's the aircrew flight equipment team, the airmen who make sure that pilots have the right gear for the trip — different gloves depending on the season and environment pilots are heading to, helmets, oxygen systems, survival vests, and even the occasional sleeping cot, which Neal and his co-pilot used for their two-day journey. The same crew will also oversee preparations for worst-case scenarios, like making sure parachutes are ready to be used if needed, or that 9mm pistols are loaded and ready for the pilots to take, in case they are downed in enemy territory, a real possibility against adversaries with sophisticated surface-to-air missile systems. Battling fatigue Without Netflix or books readily available to pass the time, Neal said that he and his partner used some of their lengthy flight time to review rules of engagement. The team was briefed before departure, but the fast-moving mission left little time for rehearsals, leaving the two to make the most of in-flight downtime. A colleague had recommended the men pack baby wipes to help freshen up as they approached their target, an attempt to help their brains lock in amid flight fatigue. "That was just another human touchpoint to it of trying to stay in the game," Neal said. "Human factors" like sleep, fatigue, and morale can all affect wartime performance. "You get to the point where it's the most important part of the mission. And the frail human body is not designed to perform at its highest level under those conditions," he shared. After a tense 20 hours of flying with little sleep, the pair was "just trying to do whatever we could to stay at the top of our game." This isn't unfamiliar, though. B-2 pilots train for the exhaustion that comes with excruciatingly long flights. "It's part of your mission qualification to get certified to do combat missions in the B-2, to understand how to manage your time, whether that's a long duration sortie" or a simulator, Neal's partner Deaile explained. The pair even did 24-hour-long simulations to practice enduring such fatigue, trading off one pilot sleeping while the other piloted the simulator. Bomber pilots train for a wide range of scenarios and situations. Ideally, everything a pilot does in combat — whether it's special in-flight maneuvers like aerial refuels or dropping bombs — is something the pilot has already done dozens of times, Neal said. "I want to make sure that I've been out there on the dance floor doing that coordination on a regular basis so that it's second nature."
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Yahoo
On r/collapse, people are ‘kept abreast of the latest doom'. Its moderators say it's not for everyone
The threat of nuclear war, genocide in Gaza, ChatGPT reducing human cognitive ability, another summer of record heat. Every day brings a torrent of unimaginable horror. It used to be weeks between disasters, now we're lucky to get hours. For many, the only sane solution is to stop reading the news altogether – advice often shared by therapists, self-help books and even newspaper articles. But to bury your head in the sand until the day the apocalypse arrives at your doorstep is not necessarily the most tranquil, nor moral, of postures. In the sprawling Reddit community r/collapse, people instead try to stare unblinkingly at the unravelling of civilization. For the roughly half a million members here, many of whom joined in the wake of Covid-19 pandemic and two Donald Trump inaugurations, the arc of history feels more like a freefall. This June, r/collapse was busy discussing the developing conflict between Iran and Israel, as well as 'wet bulbs' (a far more humid and deadly type of heatwave), the millions of air conditioners being bought in India as temperatures rise and Trump's plan to end Fema. Almost half of the members, when asked when they think collapse is going to happen, said that it's already happening Anonymous r/collapse moderator But one of the top posts tackled a more specialist topic: declining levels of phytoplankton in the North Atlantic. 'As if the North Atlantic fisheries wasn't in bad enough shape from overfishing of cod, now the base of the entire food chain has observed to be getting smaller each year for the past 60 years,' the poster wrote. A commenter added: 'Ocean acidification/die off is terrifying. Even if we solve all the other collapse problems (and we almost certainly can't) the oceans dying means the atmosphere becomes depleted of oxygen and poisonous. If humans survive those scenarios, life on Earth would more resemble that of a moon colony.' Much informed panicking ensued. There are lots of places on the internet, and especially on Reddit, that collate news stories around a theme: r/UpliftingNews, r/LateStageCapitalism and r/nottheonion (which posts news so ridiculous it seems like satire) to name few. But r/collapse is much more than a collation of links for people to feel outraged and nihilistic or warm and fuzzy about. What's striking about r/collapse is the clear-eyed, unemotional tone in which posts are written: neither pessimistic nor hopeful, just peering through the window at a relentless decline. 'We are not an activist subreddit,' one moderator, a retired history teacher, told me. 'We filter out people who want to organize and protest. We are also not inclined towards accelerationism, we're not seeking doom. We accept that perhaps it's going to happen, but it's not a conspiratorial subreddit. It's basically logic, rational and scientific.' That is thanks in part to r/collapse's 30 fairly active moderators – among them neuroscientists, environmental scientists, chemical engineers, government auditors and history teachers – who intensively maintain the subreddit as relatively objective a resource as possible. They even have a separate page, called r/collapse_wilds, for posts removed by the moderation team, usually because they did not provide high quality enough evidence. When a new moderator applies, the existing group screens them for mental health issues and ability to handle consistently distressing content, as well as overt political bias. It might sound like a lot of red tape to help run a subreddit, but when you realize what it takes to drench yourself in fatalistic topics day in, day out, you start to understand that a collapse moderator is a special kind of person. I spoke with 10 such moderators on a video chat, just as the national guard and marines were sent to quell Ice protests in Los Angeles. All are men based in North America, polite and turn-taking, though most insisted on remaining anonymous so their online roles wouldn't interfere with their real world positions. In their roles, they take the existential questions of civilization collapse seriously: What exactly constitutes collapse? Are we already experiencing it? Why aren't people reacting more strongly to its likelihood, and does either humanity or technology have the ability to prevent it? Practical questions, too: where is the best place to live, the most helpful job to have, as collapse happens? Related: The disaster preppers who were proven right: 'We lived in the car for five days' They wrestle with whether too much Trump news is distracting, and painstakingly debate posts about the morality of having children and population growth, which they say is the most controversial topic among the community. Each post from a user must come with an accompanying statement explaining why it's related to collapse that the moderators assess; sometimes it seems more like they're overseeing a grant application process rather than an online forum. The work is often philosophical in nature. 'People say that this is one of the least religious times in human history, but I think that's completely false,' said Etienne, a moderator who is based in Ontario with a background in cognitive science and neuroscience. 'Most of us have strong, strong faith in the myth of technological progress. Most people associate thinking about collapse with pessimism because you're questioning the orthodoxy of our modern religion, which is faith in progress. And I think once you've made peace with the myth that we all grew up with being scientifically false, then you go through the stages of grief, then you build some psychological resilience to live in the world.' The group says that when the media or academia write about collapse issues, they often try to end on an optimistic note, so as not to depress the reader. 'It's really hard to find a mainstream publication that doesn't end an article about, say, renewable energy, with a section that says: 'things are difficult but let's have hope' and 'it's just a matter of building more solar panels,'' Etienne said. He cited reports, including an impactful study by Simon Michaux commissioned by the Finnish government, that say it's simply impossible to replace energy with renewable sources at scale. 'But we find there's much less coverage of that – of using less energy and degrowth.' The moderators also say that people who are concerned about societal collapse tend to think it'll come suddenly with a nuclear bomb or terrible pandemic. The subreddit is of a different mind. One moderator, an engineer who preferred to remain anonymous, explained the tenets of r/collapse like this: 'In the long term, it's going to be very difficult for us to maintain this very complex industrial society. We're looking at a type of simplification of industrial civilization. I think most of our members think this is what collapse is, which is why almost half of the members, when asked when they think collapse is going to happen, said that it's already happening. 'This is the idea of catabolic collapse: that what we're living through is a series of crises, sometimes followed by momentary resolution, but the long-term trend is downturn. It's not going to be a sudden event that's everything in a single day, which I think people like preppers are more accustomed to thinking.' *** Every week, r/collapse puts out a special newsletter called Last Week in Collapse, a one-stop shop for everything that has gone wrong in the world. Its author is an international affairs researcher, who requested anonymity because their background might 'color the reader's interpretation of the events'. They're not part of the moderation group, but began writing the roundup in 2021, inspired by what they had seen on the subreddit. 'It was part of a process of making sense of the storm of news around us – almost a form of writing therapy,' they told me over email. 'It is so easy to get lost or distracted by the next thing that we forget the big picture. So I decided to start organizing and summarizing other stories because I believed it would help other collapsologists and observers zoom out and take it all in.' It makes for a pretty brutal read. This week's newsletter, for example, began with a newly published study of tree rings that suggested 'irreversible large-scale forest loss' in the Amazon; featured a study saying climate change could reduce crop yields across the US and Europe 40% by 2100, which one scientist likened to 'everyone on the planet giving up breakfast'; touched on counterintuitive research showing that some glass bottles contain up to 50 times more microplastics than plastic bottles or metal cans; and reported that this is 'the sixth consecutive year that global peacefulness has deteriorated' per the Global Peace Index. These were just a few of around a hundred links. To paraphrase Trotsky: you may not be interested in collapse, but collapse is interested in you Last Week in Collapse author 'Collapse is hard to deny when it's all laid out for you every week,' says the author. Readers are now able to spend just five or 10 minutes reading one email 'and be kept abreast on all the latest doom'. I ask what differentiates just bad news from a news story that is actually about collapse. 'I have found that it helps to imagine likely realities for humanity, position your perspective in the future, and then look backwards for the telltale signs and milestones of future collapse,' the author says. 'What factors and events will seem obvious to someone living 50 or 100 years from now? We can look back at the 1930s today and the road to WWII seems much clearer. Scientists are publishing under-appreciated studies every day, and their relevance is fairly obvious. Yet our attention lies elsewhere entirely.' A weekly roundup does seem like a useful alternative to completely ignoring society's downfall. But if things are as bad as r/collapse believes them to be, does it do us any good to inundate ourselves with news of the end of everything? Aren't we just increasing our personal suffering without making anything better? 'Yes, I sometimes wonder about the overall mental impact of Last Week in Collapse,' says its author. 'I know some people find it to be valuable, informative and even soothing. Others can't bring themselves to read it. It's not for everyone, and that's fine. To paraphrase Trotsky: you may not be interested in collapse, but collapse is interested in you.' To that end, the subreddit provides online mental health resources as well as a separate community, r/CollapseSupport, where people talk about their struggles. 'Can't stop thinking about the children', 'feeling completely hopeless' and 'scared to death for everyone' are three recent post titles. Most of the moderators say that the thing they've found most helpful in dealing with the onslaught of information is moderating itself, and connecting with people who have similar concerns across the world: debating but also sharing cat photos and having meaningful discussion about how to lead a meaningful life in the end times. But they're aware they're not always the most fun people at a party. 'I don't want to be right about this sort of situation,' said one of the moderators, an electrical engineer from the midwest. 'But if you're open-minded and you're considerate of sources, and you're approaching it from a very methodical fashion, there is much cause for concern. Working through that grief was trying. I think there's a lot of people that come to this community that maybe had my same perspective, and if I can at least help a few of those folks work through that, or come to their own peace, that adds some small iota of value to the internet space at large.' And that would be a vaguely uplifting note to end this article on, but as I'm hearing, that's the coward's way out. The truth is not all the people behind r/collapse feel like they're necessarily helping. As the author of Last Week in Collapse put it to me, there's probably no way out of the collapse: 'I do not believe we will ultimately innovate or vote ourselves out of our situation. I predict humanity is in for a polluted future of climate emergencies, famines, wars and scarcity before the end of this century. And heatwaves, civil conflicts, breakdown of ocean currents, disease, poverty, overpopulation, drought and more. So I feel a certain sense of duty to inform those who are interested, but it's probably healthier to 'chop wood, carry water' than to spend too much time following the world's problems. Most people can't really stop the machine anyway.'
New York Post
4 days ago
- New York Post
This was the single most dangerous moment for B-2 pilots during their Iran bombing raid
The B-2 Spirit bombers that obliterated Iranian nuclear facilities in Operation Midnight Hammer were exposed to grave danger in the most pivotal moment during the 25-minute operation in airspace over the Islamic Republic. The seven stealth bombers carried 14 30,000-pound GBU-57 'bunker buster' bombs for more than 18 hours after they were deployed from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri just after midnight and crossed the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea to reach Iran. But as pilots moved to drop their explosive payloads on three Iranian nuclear sites at 6:40 p.m. Saturday, the planes were at risk of losing their stealth capabilities and exposing themselves to enemy fire, The New York Times reported. Advertisement This B-2 Spirit bomber, in a 2018 exercise, shows the exact moment a payload is released and the plane loses some of its stealth capabilities. US Air Force When the two-person crews released their weapons bay doors to drop the bombs, the shape of the stealth craft changed and made them more likely to pop up on Iranian radar — exposing the daring pilots to potentially deadly counterfire. Experienced B-2 pilots told the outlet that the tense moment was punctuated by the aircraft quickly rising up into the air as it dropped the explosives, which weigh 15 tons apiece. Advertisement The ace pilots operating the B-2s on Saturday were able to navigate the risk and successfully hit their targets — the deeply embedded nuclear enrichment site Fordow, as well as facilities in Natanz, and Isfahan, which had previously been targeted by Israel. US submarines further buttressed the attack with more than two dozen Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles that struck Isfahan. The seven Spirits were then out of Iranian airspace by 7:30 p.m. on Saturday and on their way back to Missouri to complete the 37-hour non-stop flight. Two pilots sit in the cockpit of a B-2 — a $2 billion plane of which the United States has 19. U.S. Air Force Advertisement Pilots likely ran simulations of the difficult route in the days and weeks leading up to the actual bombing, the Times reported. Those pilots did have some amenities on the Midnight flight — including a microwave, a refrigerator, and a bathroom. The two-person crews also took turns lying down and resting — but both were required to be in the cockpit for take-off and all time spent in Iranian airspace. Advertisement As part of Midnight Hammer, the Trump administration launched a decoy convoy of B-2s to the Middle East by way of the Pacific Ocean, with a planned refueling in Guam. The US Air Force has a fleet of 19 B-2 bombers, the most expensive plane in history, after losing one in a crash in 2008.
