The Air Force Recovered a Live French Missile in Florida

[dufus]

 

A Florida airport called in the U.S. Air Force last week after discovering a live air-to-air missile. Officials at Lakeland Linder International Airport found the Matra 530 missile in a shipment to a defense contractor that uses the airport to house its fleet of fighter jets. The weapon was transferred to MacDill Air Force Base for disposal.

 

Authorities found the live missile in a shipment to Draken International, which specializes in providing pilots and fighter jets to fly against U.S. military pilots and air defense systems in realistic, real-world training. Draken has a fleet of 150 older jets retired from military services around the world, including the U.S., Czech Republic, South Africa, and France.

 

The Matra Super 530 is an older, obsolete radar-guided missile. Draken flies the French-made Mirage F1M multi-role fighter, which was equipped with the Matra Super 530 during its military service. It’s possible a live 530 was accidentally slipped into a shipment of parts purchased by Draken. Judging from the visible markings, it's not immediately clear there's a live missile inside, although a trained weapons handler might guess as much.

 

According to Military Times, explosive ordnance disposal techs from the 6th Civil Engineer Squadron Explosive Ordnance Disposal at MacDill Air Force Base retrieved the missile. The techs then secured the missile to the back of a flatbed truck and took it to their base for destruction.

 

“It was live, but unarmed,” an Air Force public affairs officer told the Military Times. The missile was “like having a gun with a bullet in chamber, but on safety," that official elaborated.

 

"Someone would have to arm the missile to fire it.”

 

This is the second time in two years the military confiscated a wayward Super Matra 530 from civilians. In 2019, Italian police seized another missile from a criminal gang. In an article covering that seizure, The Aviationist wrote a red band on the protective canister is a universal symbol, meaning there's an explosive warhead on the missile inside, while a yellow band indicates a real rocket motor.

 

Like the Italian missile canister, the Florida canister clearly is painted with both red and yellow bands.

source

MacDill EODs remove French air-to-air missile from Florida airport

[Nuclear Fallout]

Love it,

 

This is how "inadvertently" weapons get lost, found, used by the so called professionals.

 

Anyone remember the thing with the B52 and the "live" nukes???

 

THAT thing happened in 2007!

 

Anyway, when having matches around, be on the look out for children.

 

 

And yes, I bet this only came to light by accident.

 

Usually, those things never happen.

 

There was a Nuclear Accident in the early seventies in Europe (some fool drove a rocket with the goddamn Warhead attached through a very narrow road, had an accident , said nothing happened, closed the area off, AND IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT TOOK OFF THE WARHEAD) to this day, IT WAS NEVER EVER ACKNOWLEDGED!

 

  

[Arachnoid]

Regarding the nuke issue

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_States_Air_Force_nuclear_weapons_incident

Quote

Between 0800 and 0900 (local time) on 29 August 2007, a group of USAF airmen, called the breakout crew, entered one of the weapons storage bunkers at Minot to prepare AGM-129 missiles for transport to Barksdale. That day's missile transport, the sixth of twelve planned ferry missions, was to have consisted of twelve AGM-129s, installed with training warheads, with six missiles per pylon and one pylon mounted under each wing of a Barksdale-assigned, 2nd Bomb Wing B-52 aircraft. When the airmen entered the bunker, six live warheads were still installed on their missiles, as opposed to having been replaced with the dummy training warheads. A later investigation found that the reason for the error was that the electronic production system for tracking the missiles "had been subverted in favor of an informal process that did not identify the pylon as prepared for the flight."^[11] The airmen assigned to handle the missiles used outdated materials that contained incorrect information on the status of the missiles. The missiles originally planned for movement had been replaced by missiles closer to expiration dates for limited life components, which was standard procedure. The change in missiles had been reflected on the movement plan but not in the documents used for internal work coordination processes in the bunker.^[12]

 

An AGM-129 pylon is loaded onto the wing of a B-52 at Minot.

Although the breakout crew in the weapons storage began to inspect the missiles, an early-arriving transport crew hooked up the pylons and towed them away without inspecting or ensuring that the missiles had been inspected or cleared for removal. The munitions control center failed to verify that the pylon had received proper clearance and inspection and approved the pylon for loading on the B-52 at 0925. After taking eight hours to attach the pylons, the aircraft with the missiles loaded then remained parked overnight at Minot for 15 hours without the special guard required for nuclear weapons.^[13]

On the morning of 30 August one of the transport aircraft's flight officers, a Barksdale-assigned B-52 instructor radar navigator, closely inspected the six missiles on the right wing only, which were all properly loaded with training warheads. The B-52 command pilot did not do a final verification check, before signing the manifest listing the cargo as a dozen unarmed AGM-129 missiles to depart Minot.^[14]

The B-52 departed Minot at 0840 and landed at Barksdale at 1123 (local times) on 30 August. The aircraft remained parked and without special guard until 2030, when a munitions team arrived to remove the missiles. After a member of the munitions crew noticed something unusual about some of the missiles, at 2200 a "skeptical" supervisor determined that nuclear warheads were present and ordered them secured and the incident reported, 36 hours after the missiles were removed from the bunker at Minot.^[15]

The incident was reported to the National Military Command Center as a Bent Spear incident. General T. Michael Moseley, Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, quickly called United States Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, on 31 August to inform him about the incident. Gates requested daily updates regarding the investigation and informed President Bush about the incident. The USAF has yet to officially designate what type of incident actually occurred, Bent Spear or otherwise.^[16] The incident was the first of its kind in 40 years in the United States and was later described by the media as "one of the worst breaches in U.S. nuclear weapons security in decades".^[17]