Sunday Update 002
You Have To Be Blessed Daily, We Only Need To Be Blessed Once.
You’ve done it, you made it to another week. Let’s take a look at what happened last week in the world of JANN.
DILLY Dallying To Africa
On February 8th 02-4452, a C-32B Gatekeeper took off heading south. This was of note as usually the only time a GK departs on a Saturday is for a mission. This theory was supported by the fact that the aircraft was also sporting a callsign other than TERRA (TERRA is the callsign used when on domestic training operations), DILLY59. This comes right on the heels of the VOLVO trip which was covered in last week’s update.
They eventually made their way down to Tampa and then on to Puerto Rico before making the hop across the ocean over to the African continent.
Contractor ISR King Air Crashes in Asia
On the 6th of February a heavily modified Beechcraft King Air crashed in the Philippines. This story went largely under the radar due to the other incidents that took place within the United States later in the week. Additionally, because of the murky nature of Contractor-Owned, Contractor-Operated (COCO) aircraft details were initially scares. The Associated Press even went as far as to mention that a Water Buffalo had been killed on the ground.
Despite the scarcity in details it is now known that the aircraft in question was N359CA, a King Air owned by Metrea Special Aerospace ISR. 4 individuals, including a US Marine, perished in the accident. I know that I have individuals from their parent company that read this newsletter and I am deeply sorry for the loss of your colleagues.
The C-32Bs are becoming common(ish) knowledge
I’m a sucker for anything 757 however, I always dread the part where they mention the C-32s. They inevitably always get the C-32B story wrong. (I can’t blame them, the Wikipedia page is also mostly wrong. Unfortunately that’s really the only “source of truth” on the GKs besides the work of myself and my colleagues.) However, this video actually addresses them properly. Give it a watch below:
Athena’s First trip
While looking at an Israeli ISR jet’s activities for an individual on reddit (hi Nate) I realized that a certain jet had taken off from Texas and looked to be heading OCONUS (outside the continental United States). The jet in question was N291SR, which has been photographed by a good friend of the publication, SR Planespotter.
I made a tweet, tagged
and hit send. Little did I know that what I had caught was the first overseas deployment for the ATHENA platform. You can read more about the platform here:
BMAC
Last but not least I have setup a Buy Me A Coffee. If you feel inclined to support me and my work here is the link:
That is all for this week, maybe.
Thanks for the mention! And an another excellent update to end the week!
Heck yeah! Love the updates.