Overview
- Military, academic and allied teams completed live-fly testing of the system from Sept. 7–11, 2026 as the final event in a three-year Arctic air-domain experiment series.
- The tests used the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ HAARP high-frequency transmitter to beam radio energy into the ionosphere and a MITRE-built receiver array in Cold Bay to listen for skywave echoes from aircraft.
- Several U.S. Air Force planes including an E-3 Sentry, HC-130J search-and-rescue aircraft and KC-135 tankers flew as cooperative targets so researchers could match experimental detections to known flight tracks.
- Initial official results show the setup achieved full skywave (beyond‑line‑of‑sight) detections that correlated with truth tracks, but thorough analysis of the collected data is still under way and no operational decision has been announced.
- The effort brought together Alaskan Command, U.S. Northern Command, AFRL, Defence Research and Development Canada, MITRE and others to explore whether low‑cost receivers and existing transmitters can help close surveillance gaps caused by Alaska’s vast distances and sparse infrastructure.