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Comment by alistairSH | Hacker News Reader

The route is a public/known helicopter flight path. There's nothing secret about it.

Here's a map of the helicopter routes in the area. In this case, they were flying on route 4... https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3851p.ct004873/?r=0.67,0.258,0...

Yes, this group transports VIPs and sometimes does so in secret. This training flight was a "simple" check-ride for the pilot (simple in scare quotes because part of the ride was using the NVGs, which strikes me as fairly ridiculous in the DCA air space).

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The route itself, sure.

When this specific helicopter/mission joins the route, how fast it goes, what callsign it uses, when it leaves the route, etc. may not be so public. Or at least be treated as "try not to make it unnecessarily public".

Overclassification is absolutely a thing, too. I recall when the Snowden NSA leaks came out, government employees were still forbidden from reading the documents, even if they were published in the newspapers. Pointless? Yes. But those were the rules.

Surely either you are training, or you are on a mission, but in that case you should be competent pilot.

training on a confidential mission is just inviting disaster

Training for a mission tends to mean pretending it's the real mission, as closely as possible. People fire off $100k missiles (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrhybKEzb-0) so they know what it'll be like to do it in combat for real.

Competent people still make mistakes. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near DCA airspace, personally.

The ADSB is a simple switch. All it does is broadcast the position. It would have had zero impact on operational readiness. It’s not like they were actually flying “dark” - lights were on, they were in context with ATC, etc.

> Overclassification is absolutely a thing, too. I recall when the Snowden NSA leaks came out, government employees were still forbidden from reading the documents, even if they were published in the newspapers. Pointless? Yes. But those were the rules.

Not just government employees. I was at a defense contractor at the time, and we were also instructed to not read any of the documents online, even for people who were technically cleared to read them through proper channels.

Edit: misremembering, wasn't the Snowden leaks, it was some earlier set of leaks on WikiLeaks

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