A pilot with the Vermont Air National Guard’s 158th Fighter Wing experienced an in-flight emergency Friday morning about 13 minutes into a training flight and needed to jettison his external fuel tanks, burning off most of the fuel first, reports the Burlington Free Press. The pilot dropped the tanks over a planned location in Lake Champlain and landed safely at the wing’s home at Burlington Airport. A subsequent Free Press report said the Coast Guard had found one of the tanks near Willsboro Point, N.Y., and that an environmental team from Albany, N.Y., would retrieve it. The Coast Guard was still searching for the second tank.
The Space Force is playing midwife to a new ecosystem of commercial satellite constellations providing alternatives to the service’s own Global Positioning Service from much closer to the Earth, making their signals more accurate and harder to jam.
