Why is normally fact-based, analytical, intellectual HN promoting ~4 vacuous social media panic stories [edit: about objects in US airspace) to the front page? How does that suddenly happen?
> In military aviation, scrambling is the act of quickly mobilising military aircraft. Scrambling can be in reaction to an immediate threat, usually to intercept hostile aircraft.
In tech geek terms, it is like being in the on-call rotation for operations. When stuff blows up, you are expected to be addressing it within minutes.
In military terminology, this is your ready reaction force that can be deployed on a moments notice. The part of your military that can be “scrambled” is configured for immediate combat with no warning. Therefore “scrambling” is to deploy those immediate combat configured assets.
Militaries are large logistical organizations and it takes a long time — weeks depending on the type of unit — to spin them up to combat readiness. To be scramble-ready is very expensive both in terms of cost and wear-and-tear on personnel, so most of the military is not configured to operate this way all the time, and it would probably would not be sustainable for people to be permanently in that posture. The units that can scramble for an immediate threat buy time for other military units to spin up their full combat capability. There is a lot of rotation among units on this kind of duty to keep them fresh.
The units are ready 24/7, pilots are in flight gear, G-suits zipped up and planes ready (meaning internal INS lined up. This takes some time normally) ready to jump in and take-off within 5 minutes. Usually there's two types of scrambles: Alpha and Tango. Alpha being the real thing and Tango for training. I am not familiar with normal ops out of Portland, but back in the Cold War days our nearby US F-15's out of Soesterberg airbase in Holland conducted Tango scrambles quite regularly to keep pilots trained. Alpha scrambles were very rare except for this Russian MiG-23 without a pilot transiting the East-west DMZ in 1990. It is logistically expensive, but especially since 9/11 these units are ready. Not only in the US, but in Europe too (as well as other parts probably)
