Another aviation marvel no one has told me about

[Let'sgoflying!]

The navy uses an E6b ‘Mercury’ to fly a 5mi long paired-wire antenna almost vertically (it flies a tight cone, close to the stall) over the ocean, to communicate with subs.
TACOMO program.
I may have details ie or terms incorrect.
Will look for a link.

 

[Doc Holliday]

And?

 

[luvflyin]

The navy uses an E6b ‘Mercury’ to fly a 5mi long paired-wire antenna almost vertically (it flies a tight cone, close to the stall) over the ocean, to communicate with subs.
TACOMO program.
I may have details ie or terms incorrect.
Will look for a link.

And other planes. I haven’t watched Crimson Tide in awhile, maybe tonight.

TACAMO - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Let'sgoflying!]

And?

thank you for your informative conjunction lol

 

[ateamer]

I got to see the inside of an E-6B at an airshow. The drum that holds the antenna is impressive. It’s a giant level-wind casting reel. I don’t remember if it was a Garcia or Daiwa.

 

[Dan Thomas]

In the 1950s missionary pilot Nate Saint developed a similar means of lowering a bucket from a lightplane to the ground to deliver or pick up items in areas where there was no landing strip. At one point he added a telephone handset to the bucket to enable direct communication with folks that had no radio. His son Steve Saint demonstrates it here:

 

[hindsight2020]

So there's some mission overlap (on purpose) between the Navy's E-6, and the USAF E-4 and EC-135 suites. They go back and forth in terms of the Venn Diagram of capes, but they're by and large centered around support of the nuclear triad (not the 135s, the former two). It's not that the airplanes are kept secret on purpose, they're not a secret at all (the boxes and procedures are), it's that they're not popular with pilots.

Very much necessary mission(s), just oft-loathed by pilots because in the end, it's a mission of permanent posturing. Same parent reason we Bent Spear in '07 (and one of several reasons I didn't particularly care to remain in the platform). People get tired of the procedural practice bleeding absent the flying or ka-boom inducement. Somebody's gotta do it type of thing. Ditto for missileer morale. Plus it's run by the folks in the back, beyond the immediate "don't crash the bus before we send this beep and get that squeak" imperative lol.