I was recently on Pax for work and I saw two of these planes sitting side by side on the runway, I’ve seen them come and go from Pax a lot in years. It also seems they are always changing call signs. Any info on what these are ? Used for ? Thanks
Chris,
These are the US Navy TACAMO (Take Charge And Move Out) airborne control aircraft. They are used to pass EAMs (Emergency Action Message) & other info to underwater subs. They can trail a very very long wire antenna to do this.
In official terms:
TACAMO (Take Charge And Move Out) is a
United States military system of survivable communications links designed to be used in
nuclear warfare to maintain communications between the decision-makers (the
National Command Authority) and the
triad of
strategic nuclear weapon delivery systems. Its primary mission is serving as a signals relay, where it receives orders from a command plane such as
Operation Looking Glass, and verifies and retransmits their
Emergency Action Messages (EAMs) to US strategic forces. As it is a dedicated communications post, it features the ability to communicate on virtually every radio frequency band from
very low frequency (VLF) up through
super high frequency (SHF) using a variety of modulations,
encryptions and networks, minimizing the likelihood an emergency message will be jammed by an enemy. This airborne communications capability largely replaced the land-based
extremely low frequency (ELF) broadcast sites which became vulnerable to nuclear strike.
