Syrian Fishbed on a bombing run...

[308Mike]

So one of our "safety" officers thought it would be fun to see if the security guys were speeding around the flightline, and ran some laser/radar around a few B-52-s. Next thing we know, flares the size of pringles cans started bouncing every which way, as if the bomber shat out the 4th circle of hell.

Sounds like a modification of a story in Snopes, what about these technical items:

Additionally, there are different types of scan profiles in use, such as circular, unidirectional, bi-directional, helical, raster, palmer, conical, and track-while-scan. Police radar units are directional ones that send pulses in a relatively narrow cone in the direction the officer points the device. (This type of radar is used to prevent the operators from being exposed to the devices' high-frequency radiation over long periods of time.) Therefore, it's pretty unlikely that an officer pointing a hand-held unit at an incoming car would also manage to illuminate a flying aircraft — an intervening hill, a large building, or even heavy plant growth would block any stray signal.

Surface-to-air missile (SAM) radars behave differently than handheld police units. Also, each type or model of radar gives off very specific characteristics, and the onboard systems in military planes can differentiate among these types of threats (e.g., a SAM-2 vs. a ZSU vs. an F-16). To quote from Info-Strategies’ web site, "Every radar produces a radio frequency (RF) signal with specific characteristics that differentiate it from all other signals and define its capabilities and limitations." Excepting a case of incredible coincidence, the police radar wouldn't be on the "threat" list. Also, SAM radar units are also relatively short range systems (30-50km), since the usual practice is to employ longer-range tracking stations to keep watch on incoming aircraft, then alert the SAM unit in the aircraft’s flight path of the impending arrival of the hostile plane.

I doubt a police radar unit would cause firing of flares from a parked aircraft as the flares and defensive systems shouldn't have been enabled while parked.

[Jericho941]

And flares aren't an anti-radar decoy.

But yeah, any time the aircraft senses "weight on wheels" (through whatever means, usually a switch in the landing gear) it shouldn't be able to fire or dispense anything. However, this can be disabled in varying ways for maintenance purposes while the jet's being "run up" (external or APU power). The only way I can see something like that happening basically requires somebody to be extremely negligent or more than one avionics crew on a jet failing to communicate with each other. (It happens, it's a noisy place and you can't always see what everyone else is doing, especially on heavies). So when one has WOW disabled for some kind of checkout, the other is ops checking RWR and/or the dispensers.

So, there's a good chance Safety Officer Overachiever simply fired up his radar gun at just the right time to see the inevitable outcome of a total clusterfuck going on at that jet.

But then, again, I really don't know much at all about working on B-52s. I did make the mistake of asking an Engines specialist how he liked working on them, once.

Once.
How was it? Eight engines per jet. How do you think it was?

[SoupOrMan]

No aircraft that specializes in SEAD is left in USAF inventory.

Correct. It's done with the F-16CJ birds.

I always thought the Spark Vark loaded with about 6 or 8 HARMs would have been the ideal SEAD platform.

The EF-111A had no space in the cockpit for fire control once the ALQ-99E display and tracking system was added in. Theoretically you could use the display to launch and track missiles, but engineering and programming-wise it wasn't going to happen.