Time: Sun Nov 24 18:36:34 1996
To: Ted <tdarby@bham.net>
From: Paul Andrew Mitchell [address in tool bar]
Subject: Cruise missile route passes over Alabama
Cc: 
Bcc: Liberty Law

Cruise missiles are pre-loaded with precise
digital terrain maps, and they fly with
side-looking radar running at all times,
in order to compare the terrain map in its
memory, with the feedback from the radar.
This allows the missile to cruise very 
low to the ground (100 feet), at near
the speed of sound, making it very difficult
to detect by conventional radar defense
systems.  Its trajectory can also be 
programmed to be very complex (e.g. flying
in figure 8's for long periods), until it
is time to drop out of the sky.  They can
be fitted with nuclear weapons quite 
easily.

Just a few tidbits from my computer mapping
days ....

/s/ Paul Mitchell



At 10:45 AM 11/24/96 -0600, you wrote:
>Cruise missile route passes over Alabama
>The Birmingham News
>Sunday, November 24, 1996 
>Metro/State Section Page 22A
>
>EGLIN AIR FORCE BASE (AP) - A Tomahowk cruise missile for the fourth time
>was successfully test flown Friday after being launched from the Atlantic
>Ocean on a course over North Florida and part of Alabama.
>
>The unarmed missile was launched from a torpedo tube on the USS Boston, a
>nuclear submarine, crusing beneath the ocean's surface off Jacksonville,
>Navy officials said in a news release.
>
>It landed by parachute at this base in the Florida Panhandle after a flight
>of about 850 miles.
>
>The Navy has been using Eglin since 1985 to test cruise missiles launched
>from ships and submarines in the Gulf of Mexico on a course that took the
>weapons over the Panhandle, into Alabama and back to the Panhandle.
>
>It began shifting some of the launches to the East Coast last year to cut costs.
>
>Officials had hoped to begin launching from the Atlantic nearly four years
>earlier but the crashes of two gulf-launched Tomahawks in Alabama in 1991
>and 1992 postponed the cross-state flights until safety questions could be
>resolved. No one was injured nor any property damaged as the crashes
>occurred in unpopulated areas.
>
>
      


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