F-16 Drops Fuel Tanks, Bomb At Hill AFB

A fighter pilot dropped munitions and two external fuel tanks onto an uninhabited area near Hill Air Force Base after experiencing an in-flight emergency, according to this report from The Salt lake City Tribune.

A bomb destroyed a small tin work shed near an area where ordnance is stored on the base’s west side. It also damaged a nearby transformer and power lines, causing a basewide power outage. But base officials say no one was injured in the 3:50 p.m. incident, and the pilot landed safely. None of the stored ordnance, which is kept in underground bunkers, was damaged or destroyed.

Col. Scott Zobrist, commanding officer of the 388th Fighter Wing, said the pilot of the aircraft, an F-16 Falcon fighter jet, was alerted to an emergency situation during takeoff and, following safety procedures, jettisoned the fuel tanks and munitions before making a final pass to land the $25 million, single-engine fighter.

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Computer Spies Breach Strike Fighter Jet Project

Computer spies have broken into the Pentagon’s $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project — the Defense Department’s costliest weapons program ever — according to current and former government officials familiar with the attacks.

Similar incidents have also breached the Air Force’s air-traffic-control system in recent months, these people say. In the case of the fighter-jet program, the intruders were able to copy and siphon off several terabytes of data related to design and electronics systems, officials say, potentially making it easier to defend against the craft.

The latest intrusions provide new evidence that a battle is heating up between the U.S. and potential adversaries over the data networks that tie the world together. The revelations follow a recent Wall Street Journal report that computers used to control the U.S. electrical-distribution system, as well as other infrastructure, have also been infiltrated by spies abroad.

Attacks like these — or U.S. awareness of them — appear to have escalated in the past six months, said one former official briefed on the matter. “There’s never been anything like it,” this person said, adding that other military and civilian agencies as well as private companies are affected. “It’s everything that keeps this country going.”

Read Full Article- WSJ.com.

Read a somewhat related story from earier this week. – Chinese cyber spies have penetrated so deep into the US system ranging from its secure defense network, banking system, electricity grid to putting spy chips into its defense planes that it can cause serious damage to the US any time, a top US official on counter-intelligence has said.

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UPDATE: The Pentagon and Lockheed Martin, the lead defense contractor for the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, suggested yesterday that cyber-attacks had not caused any serious security breaches in the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons program.

Still, defense and corporate officials said attacks on the Pentagon as well as the F-35 program are constant, and former defense officials familiar with the program said some of the F-35’s less sensitive systems have been infiltrated by cyber-intruders.

“We know we are probed on this every day. We have very aggressive defensive systems. The more sensitive the information, the greater the safeguards are,” said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman. He said he was not aware of any sensitive F-35 technology having been compromised by a cyber-attack.

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