Your Online Marketplace for Classified Jet Parts

jonerik writes: "Reuters is reporting that the U.S. Air Force is less than pleased about the recent posting of a number of sensitive jet communications components on eBay, including parts for the SR-71 spy plane, the F-16 fighter, the KC-10 tanker, and the giant C-5 transport. According to the article, the parts had sat in a warehouse for 12 years after being lost in shipping when the dealer, Norb Novocin, bought the lot for $244 in an unclaimed property sale. Novocin ended up selling four of the items to bidders in a recent auction, including an X-Band Weather Radar Modulator for $500 and a high-frequency radio circuit card for $32. The Air Force is looking into the incident and Novocin is cooperating."

Comments

Lost in a warehouse?

[tmcmsail]

Isn't that where the Harrison Ford left the lost Arc?

The Air Farce, lost in space...
Fly Navy...

is there anything

[paradesign]

as truly american as ebay? its like the worlds largest garage sale. deep under the piles of shit stacked as high as landfills are some rare finds. plus if the gvmnt didnt want them sold they should have kept hold of them in the first place, instead of losing them like the abomb in sum of all fears.

Re:is there anything

[oni]

that carrier would have at last a full flight wing in the air, as well as being dead center of its carrier group. Any hostile trying to take out the carrier would have to go through a ring of aircraft - including AWACS with downward looking radar that doesn't really care if you're skimming the wave tops - followed by a ring of destroyers and cruisers. All fully armed with sea-to-air missiles and AEGIS anti-missile guns.

That's a pretty good summary of a basic fleet air defense. I think it's worth mentioning how the Soviet's actually planned to get through all that defense though.

The strategy is called a rollback. Basically, if you fire a lot missiles at an air defense system, each one will be intercepted a little closer to the target than the one before it. Slowly, the defenses are rolled back until missiles start getting through.

There's no way to stop a rollback. All Aegis or a good CWIS do is increase the number of missles required to roll the defenses back, or decrease the intercept range reduction from each missile. At some point, obviously, it would get too expensive (each cruise missile costs nearly 1mil) to fire that many - but it is always possible.

Other factors are fighter cover. The phoenix was designed to kill the bombers before they could launch (each backfire bomber destroyed = 3 cruise missiles). Submarines are a big factor. A submarine strike against one or two of the air defense cruisers (not the carrier itself) coordinated with the air strike is very effective.

Of course, the carrier group has its own subs to hunt the enemy subs. And the bombers can bring fighters to cover them. Offensive and defensive measures swing back and forth like that.

On top of that is the tactical use of all these weapons. When playing Harpoon, I used to like to feign an attack from one direction with a barrage launched by, say an Oscar submarine. Then I'd give the carrier taskforce just enough time to redeploy a couple of cruisers to that side and I'd hit them from the other side with a combined attack by bombers and subs.

If you're willing to spend the cash, it's really not all that hard to kill a single carrier. Of course, the bombers themselves need a large airbase - and that will be destroyed by the airforce right away... I could go on but you get the idea.

Re:is there anything

[mr_death]

Really, I took three deep breaths before responding.

Zathrus my boy, you're spouting acronyms without knowing what the hell you're talking about. A few of your errors:

1. An AWACS is an Air Force aircraft, built on a modified Boeing 707 airframe. There's no way that it would ever land on a carrier. You should have referenced the E-2 Hawkeye.

2. Carriers are one of the fastest surface vessels in the US Navy. The predominate term in the drag equation is the length of the waterline. Further, since most of our CVs are nuclear power, the CV doesn't burn excessive amounts of fuel when it goes fast.

3. Neither you or I know what's in the SOP, as the interesting bits are classified. It is a fair bet that every US ship would go to condition III (wartime cruising) after a WMD is detonated in the US.

4. AEGIS cannon?!?!? There's no such critter. See http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/factfile/weapo ns/wepaegis.html . My guess is that you meant CIWS (Close In Weapons System, the R2D2-looking Phalanx.)

5. As a deception, sometimes the oiler is in the center of the formation.

6. It may be difficult to penetrate the defenses of the battle group, but not impossible.

7. Boats do not cruise "through thermal layers" -- they are above or below the layer, as the situation dictates.

Re:Pathetic...

[Captain Chad]

Not Novocin's fault. From the article:

1. "Novocin informed the depot, who said they did not want the parts and suggested he sell them on eBay."

Typical government incompetency. It was only after Newsweek contacted them that they began to realize there was a problem.

Here's one of the finished auctions..

[xtermz]

Did a search on ebay for X-Band in completed items, and this came up. Guy's ebay id is estateauctionsinc , looks like he's just a guy who buys stuff at estate sales and such. Ebay has him listed as being from Jacksonville, so I looked up Norb Novcain in the white pages and yep, he's from Jacksonville...

Here's The Actual EBay Pages...

[cybrpnk2]

Here's the Completed Items page for this vendor that includes the USAF items mentioned at the bottom of the web page.

Might not be true

[brejc8]

My old physics teacher used to be in the army and I'm not sure how true this is but he claims that during the sixties UK was holding most of its plutonium reserve in an unmarked warehouse in New York.
When they did tell the New York mayor he wasnt pleased at all.

Reporter missed the point.

[OaITw]

In a top notch piece of reporting we are told the defense department is investigating how an antiques dealer bought a bunch of defense related parts at an unclaimed property sale at a warehouse and then sold them on ebay for a profit. I imagine a house subcommittee will soon be on the case also. My parents own warehouses. Unclaimed property sales are standard proceedures. Neither the warehouse owner or the buyer knows ahead of time what is being sold. Since there is no mystery there, the government investigators must be stuck on how exactly someone gets an item listed on ebay. I have actually found the ebay interface fairly understandable, but if the investigator are not computer savy it may present some problems I am sure. Next step of course will be to investigate how exactly the antique dealer got that little blue star next to his name. Very suspecious indeed.

What's next?

[PissingInTheWind]

Drugs, kidneys, virginity... Now classified plane parts.

How long before they get to sell an alzheimer-suffering ex-president on EBay?

What's the fuss?

[melquiades]

Seems to me that the Air Force should have bid on the item like everyone else.

I know things are tight at the defense defense department these days, what with only billions of dollars to waste instead of billions and billions and billions ... but I'm sure they could have scrounged up the money for a winning bid. :)

Actually, I wonder if the reason the DoD can't seem to pass an independent audit, and in fact can only account for about a third of their budget, is that they're already blowing all their dough buying antique lamp shades on eBay.

Flea Markets

[Alien54]

Heck you can find all kinds of things, some of the strangest things, at the MIT Flea Market. Perfect for the budding and experienced mad scientist.

There is also this list of electronics flea markets for the North East

I imagine there are a few someplace near silicon valley as well as CalTech, etc.

;-)

Canada's record not so good either

[shaldannon]

In 2001, NPR had a story about how a sizable portion of Canada's ground hardware was stuck on a Russian shipping vessel just off the east coast because the vessel's owners wanted to be paid for the shipment back to Canada, the Canadian government had paid a contractor, and the contractor had gone out of business without paying the Russian shipper.

Re:Pathetic...

[mgarraha]

Here's the Newsweek article mentioned in the Reuters story. I think the shipper who was supposed to take the stuff from Dover to Warner Robins is at fault.

The Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service holds public auctions, but they exclude items with demil code "D".

How about an ass kicking?

[zerofoo]

You can also buy an ass kicking....if you're into that sort of thing. Bid here -ted

Cooperation

[mstyne]

The Air Force is looking into the incident and Novocin is cooperating.

Air Force: "You should be seeing a squadron of B-2 Spirits flying over your corporate headquarters in about ten minutes."

Novocin: "Um, yeah, so whaddya wanna know?"

Not a surprise

[BoneFlower]

I've seen ebay ads for high end crypto gear. Technically unclassified itself, but it was built to fill hardware crypto keys, the crypto being quite classified when paired with the hardware it went to. With a couple connections in the right places, someone could use that to fill a STU-III(secure telephone) with current crypto

What bothers me the most

[T5]

isn't the altimeters or weather gear, but the IFF (identify friend or foe) transmitter. Properly coded (which is the hard part), this could prevent friendly forces from being able to automatically target an incoming aircraft from a hostile force, as well as providing a way for a hostile aircraft to approach friendly forces.

Sign of the times..

[k98sven]

Wow is the world changing, you can buy -everything- online now..

(shameless plug..)
I remember, back during the Cold War, we didn't have the internet,
we had to sell these things at secret meetings with the "attaché for tourism" from the embassy of some shady nation..

You had to get plane tickets to all these wierd,
exotic locations like Geneva and the Caribbian, to meet these jerks. (They never even said thanks)

Nowadays, I don't even have to leave my nice CIA office, and I always get the best price for my contraband! Ebay is great!

(/shameless plug)