Intel Update - Feb 22 - Cables, Planes, and Risk

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground this is the Intel update for February 16th through the 22nd 2025 so let's get right to it starting off with the Northeast region I briefly wanted to touch on uh the event that I'm sure a lot of you have been very much inundated with over the past week and this is the crash or Crash Landing of Delta flight 4819 in Toronto as the investigation is still ongoing pertaining to this Aviation mishap we don't have a whole lot of details to go off of. However we do know that the aircraft crashed while land at the airport and uh everyone survived so that's the good news fantastic news it's it's an utter miracle that uh anyone walked away from this uh crash. However uh it looks as if right now everyone survived with comparatively minimal uh injuries of course due to the current threat environment I guess you should say many people immediately want to know why why did this happen why did this specific incident happened and why do these incidents seem to be happening more often so I will talk about that in just a moment because this is a very fascinating Trend uh that we that we are starting to see as far as this specific incident goes it's of course hard to say the official investigation is ongoing it will take many many months probably to get any sort of definitive uh assessment on this particular crash. However I do want to mention that based on photograph and video evidence of this plane crash most of the rhetoric that I have seen most of the assessments that I have seen coming from Pilot commercial airline pilots on social media on forums on the internet at large most of the sentiment is that the pilot in this case failed to flare the aircraft properly which caused the aircraft to make contact with the runway harder than it should which in turn caused the aircraft to break up essentially so right now the initial armchair quarterbacking speculation is that this was an exceptionally hard Landing due to some sort of pilot error now we don't know if any kind of weather or wind shear into this we don't know if there was any kind of instrument failure or any kind of um Hardware failure on the on the aircraft we just don't know yet all we can do is look at the video like everyone else and and see that yeah this was a very very hard Landing that that could have gone uh much much worse so that's the kind of General sentiment with this specific incident now I did want to dig into this a little bit more so please bear with me for a moment because I think we're starting to people are starting to ask a lot of questions uh not just why did this spe specific incident happened. But why do incidents like this seem to be happening there is a general question out there of why do Aviation mishaps continue to happen at an increased Pace right or at least that's what it seems like and this is not made any better by mainstream media doing what mainstream media does best which is extremes right so we were starting to see or at least I guarantee you if you were to go searching for for new stories on any kind of Aviation mishap right now the the information space is very saturated with two kinds of ideas right and the first idea is everything's fine all of this is normal you're blowing this way out of proportion don't even look at it don't even click on the article Don't even don't even acknowledge that an aviation a plane crash happened just move along and the Other Extreme which is we're all going to die essentially and mainstream media organizations like the typical ones you see. But also in a lot of cases in so-called independent journalists right especially on social media like Twitter they will bounce back and forth between these two extremes of nothing's happening why why are shame on you for even focusing on a plane crash and uh oh my gosh we're all going to die we're lucky that an aircraft even flies. Anyway right so these are two extremes and as many of you probably can guess the truth is somewhere between these two extremes when it comes to the former position the everything's fine don't even pay attention to this kind of thing a lot of times you'll see mainstream media articles written sort of like this this is from ABC channel 8 in somewhere America uh where they're writing about the statistic that anyone can obviously pull from the NTSB and from the FAA and if you read articles like this you get the sentiment that okay well the they're blowing this out of proportion the total number of aircraft uh incidents and accidents this year is below the average uh even so this is all just smoke and mirrors don't worry about it. However as you can probably imagine once again a purely statistical analysis of the raw data that the NTSB and the FAA put out it's not going to capture the full picture it's not going to factor in things like instinct atmospherics and and things like gut assessments survival instincts these things are very very important now from a data science perspective I'm sure a lot of people scoff at this well the data is the data data doesn't lie no data doesn't lie. But data can be misleading if you capture the wrong data to use to make a point right this is a very deep rabbit hole that we can talk about at a later time I think that it's it's a worthy thing to talk about. But but just for today let's in the interest of transparency let's go through the NTSB the national Transportation safety board's monthly Aviation dashboard and as we can see if we factor in uh all of the aircraft incidents that have happened so far there were 63 uh Aviation accidents in January and there were 35 in February so far as this data has been updated it was last updated on February 20th that's when I pulled these screenshots and you can very clearly see that this is below the number of accidents that have occurred for uh a long period of time right for many years uh. But just for transparency's sake you can go to these dashboards and you can look at all of this data and you can form your own conclusions but in doing so I would encourage you to think about how can this data lie to me is it possible for this data to not entirely be the best way of looking at this so when it comes to our own risk management perspective we're in this kind of weird nebula space where everyone's gut instinct is why are these aircraft incidents and crashes happening more often or being more severe when they are happening. And then we look at the data because we're trying to be objective we're trying to you know do the right thing and see is this happening more often no it's not happening more often it's happening less often. But when it does happen it it sure does seem like it's a it's it's becoming a little bit more serious so I say all of that to bring in Risk mitigation the giant scary risk management Matrix that everyone loves to hate when you read these news media articles on aircraft crashes I guarantee you in every single one of them you will find the obligatory statement well aircraft crashes are very rare and it's safer than driving or something like that that's the general sentiment that seems to be culturally socially politically economically whatever required to even talk about an aviation mishap it's safer than driving right that's that's what you get this is because we for whatever reason feel obligated to point out that Aviation mishaps are usually categorized right down here in the risk management Matrix right they're very rare right they're very very rare. But when they do happen they tend to be either major or severe when we're talking about a catastrophic incident now once again there are a variety of aircraft Aviation mishaps and you can have an aircraft mishap where a tire blows out on Landing or takeoff or something and that gets classified as an incident so the overall risk to you is pretty low right I'm not talking about those kinds of incidents I'm talking about the kind that can have you crawling out through an emergency exit this chart itself s is probably quite inflammatory. But I personally would C categorize Aviation incidents or the risk of a problem occurring the risk of an emergency happening during a flight is very rare but if it's going to happen the ones that I'm going to be concerned about and the ones that I want to prepare for are either going to be of major or severe right. But there is one thing we have to remember risk mitigation generally speaking we can mitigate risk down to an acceptable level based on preparations we can take right so in commercial Aviation what can passengers do to mitigate the risk if there is any what little risk there is what can passengers do to mitigate it not much you are cattle in a tube in the sky right there's not much you can do you can be situationally aware you can pay attention to things that are going on you can carry uh survival and medical gear whatever you can get past TSA you can do that. But other than that there's there's not a whole lot you can do so what's the bottom line here what why does this matter to talk about well I I wanted to address this because again the information space is very saturated on this so a lot of questions are coming out the first question is are Aviation Maps being over Amplified in the media or are the media sources amplifying this to make it seem like it's more of a dire threat than it is well to answer that question again we have to get back to the definitions if you're defining the mishaps that are occurring if you're defining them in terms of numbers then yeah the mainstream media is going to over amplify things because in terms of pure data pure numbers the number of Aviation crashes and incidents and accidents is is much lower than it has been historically. However if you're defining mishaps in terms of severity the answer is not so clear is it because we may have to figure out a way of quantifying subjective data the that's a very hard task to do and the more subjective something is the more variation that you have and The Wider your assessments start to start to become so this factors into the next question which is are Aviation mishaps in increasing in severity. Even though the overall number of incidents is going down I don't know maybe more data is definitely needed but I suspect so uh that's just my personal opinion again I'm sure a lot of a lot of people in the aviation industry would disagree. But it seems like we're not measuring things as accurately as as we need to be doing so maybe maybe we need to look at how uh the assessments are are carried out. But in any case I suppose this is probably all just a grand waste of time because at the end of the day is this still exercise in personal risk assessment and personal risk mitigation yes the answer to that is yes you're still the individual person who buys a plane ticket is still going to have to weigh the risks so using what we've learned so far and and what we've discussed so far let's come back to Delta flight 4819 and see does any of this factor in what what are some of the initial Lessons Learned what are some of the things that we could have done better if we were maybe a passenger on this aircraft one of the main things that we can learn from this is that the survival Doctrine remains relevant okay and what I mean by that is please pay attention to the safety brief these days when everybody's flying it seems like as soon as everybody gets into their seat they put their seat Bel on they pop their earbuds in and they zone out for the rest of the flight statistically speaking we have proven time and time again especially based on the mishaps that have occurred this year alone what is the most risky point of any flight shortly after takeoff and shortly before landing that is the highest risk portion of your entire flight that's why the seat belt sign is on for a certain period of time that's not the pilot arbitrarily saying you can now leave your seats no there's a doctrinal process behind this basically it means that they've cleared a certain altitude threshold and it's exceptionally statistically unlikely for a disaster to occur it really is for your safety it's not just to keep you in your seat and out of their hair it's it's a real thing so that is something to remember again another thing that not a lot of people are going to want to hear is personal fitness is Paramount and I say that not just because it's important for everyone I say that because it has become even more apparent As Americans in general specifically Americans tend to be a lot more unhealthy you may be physically fit you may be uh in the gym every day you may be in good shape and improving constantly. But I guarantee you most of the people around you are not just to be as indelicate as humanly possible looking around on some planes these days it's you really question you really question can this person you know sitting three or four rows in front of me between me and the exit can they fit through that emergency exit on some aircraft it's no problem on some aircraft it might be so once again this is a uh something that I I don't think gets factored into a lot of NTSB data if you know what I mean again this is just some of my initial thoughts after this I don't know how helpful this will be for for a lot of you. But these are the things that I think about when we start hearing about these these clusters of Aviation incidents occurring more often so we'll move on from there and we'll talk about something else that occurred in New Foundland yesterday as a matter of fact so moving up north just slightly to the area where I have not made a map for yet our Canadian Brethren to the north have had themselves a cable cutting incident technically this is the second time that an undersea Communications cable a fiber optic cable has been cut between Nova Scotia and New Foundland and Labrador so this cable ran from dingwell to cadroy and it was actually cut by what they think is a an anchor dragging incident back in December so I I saw it then and I I didn't really pay attention because anchor dring things happen all the time now when it's in the Baltic Sea it's a little different we'll talk about that in a moment. But anchor dragging incidents happen quite often so not that big of a deal well this time uh the repair company went out there and showed us a picture of the actual cable itself and again I'm no expert on this sort of thing. But it sure looks like that was cut with some sort of pneumatic uh snipping apparatus that we may have seen before and it would seem that at least the crew of the uh the vessel that that went to go repair this this cable thinks the same same thing so this photo really takes this uh case into the realm of interesting and I guess we'll have to see what comes of it uh I have not heard of any suspected Russian or suspected Chinese or even suspected American cable cutting operations taking place in Labrador uh that's very strange. But this is very interesting and slightly concerning because as many of you know in this General region are the old school sosus arrays that have a very long and very interesting history with regards to detecting Russian submarines so this is a geographic region of the world and in which it doesn't really get a lot of press doesn't get a lot of attention uh most of the time. However during the height of the Cold War this was a uh this was a pretty happening place and I think that this cable cutting incident May start to Signal a little bit of that occurring in our more modern times which is interesting so again it's very speculative there's no real definitive proof of anything. However we know that the number of that can do this is very limited especially when it comes to making a clean cut like this it's it's it's going to draw that the list of suspects down to uh just a few people just a few Nations so of course the US Navy and the the Canadians are not going to tell us if the sonar beds out there in in the North Atlantic have been cut or tapped or anything like that we're they're they're not going to tell us about that that's never going to be made public. But very interesting that this is occurring in the same general region so something to uh keep an eye on I guess another thing to keep an eye on is the situation out in Ohio and this is the ongoing crisis with regards to the terrain denial or Force projection operations being conducted in Lincoln Heights yes the situation in Lincoln Heights continues as before uh as a matter of fact it's gotten worse so I didn't want to keep this fresh in everyone's mind because of the follow on effects so essentially the short version is the police did not do anything at all uh with regards to these armed men and Lincoln Heights that up checkpoints demanding to know why people are in their neighborhood news flash is not their neighborhood. But demanding to know why people are in the area intimidating people with guns saying you can't go through certain checkpoints unless you're approved and all of this taking place on a major major highway since the police did nothing guess what they've become emboldened and they've pushed their perimeter out as you would expect so the manager of the local Wendy's there at the offramp uh has stated that and and confirmed to journalists at least that armed men were harassing people and continue to harass people in the Drive-Thru of that Wendy's asking them why they're there and telling them to leave and things like that uh the the police response so far all of the statements from the local police have been the classic and I mean utterly classic cases of essentially well we drove through the area and didn't see anything or I'm not aware of any problems that's the most commonly repeated phrase based on from law enforcement officials in the area I'm not aware of any problems again we know what this is the the local PD the local sheriff's department doesn't want to police this they really do not want to acknowledge what's going on they don't want to do it so they're just kind of ignoring the problem. But what I find to be very interesting is that a lot of very openly far-left media groups have gone in there to try to get the story and they have been harassed intimidated told they're going to be shot uh things like that so you know you can see these quotes from the the news media articles of journalists saying far-left Journal journalist saying we're being threatened with murder here so uh this is also made worse by from what I have seen manipulation on specifically Twitter so for many of you who are users of Twitter who have used Twitter since Elon Musk took over many of you know that they have this community notes feature that pops up under several posts where you know users can add context to posts well from what I've seen pretty much all of the posts that are calling this illegal Behavior out for being illegal are have very very false Community notes underneath them so they will say that the the efforts were Justified because of the uh you know Neo-Nazi protest or something like that and the at least one Community note that I see here just has blatantly false information so they say that the checkpoint doesn't exist it was a police checkpoint that's not true there was a police checkpoint right when the initial incident took place just police blocking the road to keep the proes away from each other. But that only lasted for about 15 minutes the checkpoints that people are concerned about are being run by people who are shoving guns in you know people's faces and saying you can't drive on a public road that's the checkpoint that people are concerned about and these checkpoints keep popping up so again this is a very serious situation that I think is going to get out of hand very quickly because it keeps expanding in a larger sense for those of you who maybe don't recognize this type of behavior this is how uh Insurgent groups get started this is how they are able to take advantage of what we call power vacuums right now this is a power vacuum Lincoln Heights is a power vacuum no one in Authority with any government Authority wants to do anything about the situation so guess what Warlords pop up and this is exactly what's happened and it's and it's spreading uh out of Lincoln Heights so hopefully the situation will simmer down. But I'm concerned that this situation is not going to simmer down I'm concerned that because this Dynamic and power and control is not addressed and the local PD and local sheriff's department basically just says uh we don't get paid enough to deal with this this is the kind of thing that's going to get out of hand very quickly because this power vacuum as long as that power vacuum is allowed to exist these groups will grow stronger and more importantly is probably going to happen somewhere else something to keep in mind uh if you're in the area if you're especially if you're in Cincinnati a lot of the local groups will look at what's happening up up north in Lan Heights and they may uh they may get some ideas so I guess we'll have to wait and see how it turns out moving outside the United States for for a bit I briefly wanted to mention that as of this morning I've seen a lot of reports reporting from a few European media groups that claim that the sea lion one cable between Finland and Germany was cut once again as of me putting these slides together this is a very developing thing I saw the story last night. But uh there hasn't really been a whole lot of corroborating information on this so I'll I'll just briefly mention it and uh we can wait to see if we get any more information on it next week. But right now this is the third time that that cine1 cable has been cut ca's being cut at the exact same time almost at the exact same time in the Baltic Sea and in Labrador that's very interesting so it would seem that while negotiations are ongoing with this Ukraine war thing uh at least a lot of the speculation is that these types of Cold War era Spy game kind of things are uh are continuing to go on so I don't know is this being done by by Russia to pressure peace talks uh maybe you'd expect them to do something like this uh in in that case. But there's no way to know again it's all just going to be very speculative because I can't swim down there and and take a picture of the cable myself we having to rely on a lot of third party information from agencies and groups that are not really known for telling the truth so much so something that will definitely be a a sticking point for NATO right now because NATO has had an increased Maritime security patrol packed whatever they want to call it in the Baltic Sea that basically a few NATO member states have put um their their Navy ships on increased Patrols in the Baltic like that's going to do anything I mean the general sentiment is they can have a destroyer or something literally right up next right up next to a Chinese ship and watch that Chinese ship drag anchor over top of a cable and what are they going to do detain the ship. And then let it go again I mean that's just the kind of the European response to this at the moment so we'll have to see how it all shakes out. But once again submarine cables very important part of global infrastructure when it comes to to Communications and things and uh they keep being cut mysteriously for no reason whatsoever apparently so hopefully we'll have more data next week so that's pretty much all I have for today let's roll into the intercepted ghost net reports for this week this week was pretty good uh there were a lot of a lot of people sending messages back and forth which is great I saw a lot of testing people trying to work email and win link and things like that it it was pretty neat so uh I know that it's it's very limited in terms of capabilities. But it's still very good to see and there were also a lot of news reports for inance since in Spokane Washington there was a fairly large protest I'd say with 700 participants the the person says here. But nothing resulted from it so fairly standard operation for this time of year I suppose somebody also mentioned here uh there was a trainy arment near Union uh New Jersey so yeah that's that's something that I didn't write about this week in the wire. But I should have I should have mentioned that and of course somebody mentioning or transmitting the wire I only got pieces of it so that must have been very far away from me. But that looks like I somebody cut and pasted my wire report report for that day uh into gs8 and transmited the whole thing takes a long time takes maybe 10 15 minutes to send over the radio a wire report that is even just a short one so sometimes they're uh fairly fairly large. But yeah uh the ghost's doing good I am still working on the next iteration of it uh it will not be ready for some some period of time I know this has been going on for a while uh. But upgrades are coming uh there will be more things that will help help out I think with regards to using HF radio a little bit more a little bit more deliberately so that's pretty much all I have for today thank you guys all for watching thank you for all of your support as well it's been kind of a busy year already and we're we're just approaching the end of February so we can already see it's going to be very busy time for the foreseeable future. But that's okay I guess nobody will say that we live in boring times that's for sure so so these are the sources for today again you can get the the links which are clickable either from uh the the slides which I post on patreon or from the obsid in pages for all of these reports throughout the week so so once again thank you all for watching thank you for your support and we will. See you next time and as always fight in the shade.