This is the final report readers received. Expand the yellow notes to see wording or claims changed after the independent fact-check.
SKW3681, a SkyWest E175 off Salt Lake City at 1406Z, leveled at FL360 - then came down hard from 1436Z at up to 8,000 ft/min, squawking 7700 from 1441Z: 22,000 ft shed in about seven minutes before leveling at 13,700 ft near St. George - the textbook shape of a pressurization-type emergency descent, though the cause is not in the data. After a dozen minutes level it diverted into Las Vegas, on the ground by 1512Z.
Cyprus is fighting one of its worst wildfires in memory in the Troodos foothills, and the response reads like a coalition: Jordanian Air Force AT-802s NASHMI1 and NASHMI02 took the morning shift (0942-1151Z), Australian-registered Air Tractors FOREST7, FOREST3, and VH-DBQ the afternoon, looping the massif between reloads at Paphos and Larnaca; RAF helicopters STING82 and STING87 from Akrotiri spent hours low over the southern foothills.
Three airliners - a Turkish flight, a Belavia 737, and Air Serbia’s ASL132 - were each plotted in a 1.2-nm circle at 52-56 kt around one point 10 km southwest of Smolensk, at cruise altitude. No jet flies like that. While ASL132’s transponder “orbited” Smolensk 1426-1451Z, multilateration put the real aircraft 400 km away over Lithuania. One fixed point, three aircraft, hours apart: spoofing from a shared external source, not an avionics fault.
Six UAVs with forestry callsigns worked Turkey’s fire belt: ORMAN67, ORMAN71, ATMACA, and TCB 808 on station at the anchor, ORMAN69 and ORMAN73 earlier. Textbook fire watch: fixed 2-3 nm orbits, mostly 15,000-18,000 ft, one over each patch: Thrace, the Manisa belt, the Antalya coast, Bodrum, Adana. ORMAN67 logged nearly nine hours across three stations. Bases and orbits match, one for one, the five centers Baykar says the forestry directorate flies its fire-watch TB2s from.
Yesterday’s two refueling anchors bracketing the Strait of Hormuz were staffed again: the Gulf of Oman anchor from before 0510Z onward by a relay of KC-46s - five airframes with overlapping handovers, the day’s last relief arriving as the picture closed - the Al Dhafra anchor by a KC-135R and a KC-46. Positions are MLAT and gappy - windows are minimums, and the overnight in between is unobserved. Same boxes, second day running.
