Re: Mystery Missile or Jetliner Contrail over Southern Cal.
If so that is badass on their part. I always thought it would be cool to send an F-117 into North Korea in the middle of the night, have it do a touch and go, then brag about it later. Realistic...I doubt it, but certainly a better way to show off the size of our donger.
Funny you mention. When I was based in Korea one day way back when, a buddy of mine and I launched in our A-10s to go be Forward Air Controllers over different parts of South Korea next to the DMZ. A US aircraft carrier had shown up off the east coast of South Korea, and its air wing wanted a little play time and fam time working with Korea-based units. They coordinated with us to meet, with 2 F/A-18s each, up near the DMZ and practice simulated air-ground ordnance employment. My buddy and I split after takeoff, him going to his Observation Point (OP) , and me to mine........each being a geographical landmark where the Hornets were supposed to meet us. My two Hornets show up in about 15 mins, and I work them for about another 15 minutes coordinating simulated airstrikes. They bingo out and RTB to their carrier. Just as Im about getting done with them, my partner calls up on interplane from his OP located about 20 miles away asking if my Hornets had shown up. I told him yeah, and they were preparing to leave. He said his never checked in. He attempted to call them on a few different freqs with no response. Our mission complete, and figuring his Hornets had just aborted their mission with no way to communicate that to us, we RTBd to our own base. Folllowing landing, there was brass waiting for the both of us and we were instructed to shutdown immediately and leave the postflight to other pilots to handle. We were shuffled to the Wing HQ and into the Colonel's office where we were immediately grilled on what happened? We told them one section of Hornets showed and the other didn't......why? Turns out, my buddy's section of Hornets departed a little late, had the wrong freq and had inputted the wrong coordinates in their INS. They flew past his OP, across the DMZ and about 45 miles into North Korea, attempting to contact my buddy. They hung around in North Korea for another 20 minutes attempting contact with him, then figuring that WE had likely aborted our own mission, they turned back south and slowly trucked back across the DMZ into South Korea and to their carrier. No North Koreans responded, no MiGs, no SAMs, nothing. They had South Korean radar controllers yelling warnings to them on guard, but never received them, etc. Never did find out what happened to that crew, but the NKs didn't take kindly to some of their own senior military leadership after that one.
So there's the story for the day.
