East Coast: the W-72 Reports

East Coast: the W-72 Reports

Between June 2013 and April 2014 three Navy F/A-18 squadrons flying from NAS Oceana filed seven hazard reports from warning area W-72 off Virginia; the Navy’s FOIA reading room holds them as printed on 29 May 2019. On the night of 23 April 2014 a VFA-11 crew found two radar tracks at “0.0 Mach” and 15,000 and 12,000 feet, used “multiple on-board sensors to verify that HUAD1 and HUAD2 were small IR significant objects and not false radar track files”, and saw two more objects cross the infrared field of view “at a high speed”. The next day two VFA-11 jets held a stable radar track at 11,000 feet but could not see anything. Other crews saw a white aircraft with “an approximately 5 foot wingspan”, a silver object “approximately the size of a suitcase”, and a white object “approximately the size and shape of a drone or missile” that passed about 200 feet away. The reports spell out HUAD as “Hazard Unidentified Aerial Device”, give as the cause objects operating “without coordination”, and name no operator. In 2023 Ryan Graves, a VFA-11 pilot in 2014, told Congress under oath that the detections began “After upgrades were made to our jet’s radar systems”.

Source document: Original public reference