There's a lot of chatter about those “airborne nuclear command centers”, but these two Boeing E6A Mercury aircraft were indeed flying almost daily since over the past month, publicly available flight data shows: the AE0414 flew at least on 20 days, and the AE0415 at least 14.
https://twitter.com/marcambinder/status/1311921340354564096
The Boeing E6A Mercury #AE0414, one of those “flying nuclear command centers,” was publicly tracked on 20 out of the past 31 days.
And here's the flight data for that other E6A Mercury, #EA0415. It was publicly tracked on 18 out of the past 31 days. (That's 4 more days than I initially mentioned; I'm sleepy. H/t @Amstelsam and @BillDedman for making me properly fact-check these flights btw.)
And, as @BillDedman noted, there are more than those two E6B aircraft. Thanks to @steffanwatkins I'm aware of at least another handful of those that are publicly trackable. (Oops, I called them E6As in the thread, but hey, I was about to sleep when I came across this.)
So, tl;dr = these are highly likely to be routine flights, the E6Bs are up in the air regularly, also on a larger timescale. As @GuardedDon points out, the need for their function is constant, not occasional. Here's some background info: nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/dead…
And here's more, from @Aviation_Intel. Thanks @AllyMenthol for flagging. thedrive.com/the-war-zone/3…
“I can confirm these flights were pre-planned missions. Any timing to the President's announcement is purely coincidental,” Karen Singer, Chief of Media Operations for the U.S. Strategic Command, told CNN's @jimsciutto.
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