IDF Almost Done Testing Airplane Vanishing Device

“We are less than a year away from being able to cause a system failure in almost any civilian aircraft, and a good number of airborne military systems.”

Tel Nof Air Force Base, August 16 – Senior commanders in the Israel Air Force are expressing satisfaction at the progress of the IDF’s development of an aircraft-disappearing device that works even on faraway Asian planes. It has been successfully deployed at least four times so far, and attention successfully deflected to other possible causes.

Over the last year and a half the development team has tested the prototype device a number of times, on slightly different types of aircraft. Each time, they report, the system has functioned at least as well as expected, but usually better, and that the development and testing phase was slated to be completed a year ahead of schedule, given the success of the tests.

The most prominent test of the system took place when an Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 disappeared somewhere over the Indian Ocean last year, with the pieces of the craft successfully concealed until two weeks ago, after all traces of IAF involvement had been removed, and the 777 pieces were released to wash ashore on the island of Réunion. But other infamous aviation disasters were similarly caused by the Israeli system, such as a flight that went down over a rebel-held area of Ukraine and sparked exchanged accusations between that country and Russia.

Among the most successful aspects of the development has been the elimination of all traces of IDF involvement in the disappearances, which have been attributed to weather, technical malfunctions, pilot error, and other system failures – everything but the actual cause, the IDF’s Aircraft Squelching System (ASS). ASS is designed to operate up to 20,000 kilometers from a target, meaning not only that no airplane on Earth is safe, but that most satellites in low-Earth orbit are also at risk. IDF representatives insisted they have not tested ASS on objects in orbit yet, but acknowledged that the first obvious space targets are reconnaissance and communications satellites.

“We are less than a year away from being able to cause a system failure in almost any civilian aircraft, and a good number of airborne military systems,” said a senior IAF officer who spoke on condition of anonymity. “ASS works on craft as small as drones.”

The technology behind ASS is a closely guarded secret, but it evidently does not use explosives or projectiles of any kind. “We believe that ASS involves emissions of some sort that disrupt an aircraft’s sensors, possibly some gaseous matter, but it is impossible to tell without more information,” said aviation expert Seymour Butz. “It’s relatively easy to add scorch marks to the pieces later, and convince even forensics experts that the cause of a crash was a surface-to-air missile.”

The IAF officer said the IDF had developed countermeasures in case ASS is aimed at Israeli aircraft. “I’m not at liberty to discuss the technology, but essentially, the defensive system is a mirror-image of the offensive one. We call it Special Systems Armor, or SSA. It’s basically ASS backwards.”