Thread by @steffanwatkins

You know what I haven't seen fly lately? US-registered #N330TT shell company-owned, related to MAG Aerospace. That's the famous ISR King Air that #CANSOFCOM contracted to conduct "training" (with their ADS-B transponder off) over Ottawa.

#A3978A
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Normal aircraft cannot degrade their transponder emissions and go from using ADS-B (broadcasting their exact location) to simple Mode-S (no location broadcast) only a day apart; it's a signature of a spook plane, and I thank them for a great example of one
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Here we see what ISR training looks like, hours of precise orbits around a target. They're using Mode-S, so the jaggy lines are from multilateration slop; their flight path is actually very smooth, the jaggies are just a sensor anomaly.

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The thing about training is there's no reason to turn off the transponder, as MAG Aerospace demonstrates over Hagerstown NY, where they operate from.

https://twitter.com/steffanwatkins/status/1540374665205469189

Strangely they turned off their transponder while "training" over Ottawa back in January and February, which isn't the behaviour that they would normally do while training; see above. Nobody has yet dragged an explanation out of #CANSOFCOM yet for that one.

My assessment is #CANSOFCOM does a lot of navel gazing, and has terrible open source situational awareness. They demonstrated they don't understand how OSINT aircraft tracking works and embarrassed the gov't, forcing the PM to answer for their actions in QP multiple times.