AARO GoFast Case Resolution and Methodology

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Data
The only data available to AARO from the “Go Fast” event were from a compressed Windows
Media File (.wmv) [ref 4]. The recording’s metadata does not contain the F/A-18’s
georeferenced position and heading, which are necessary to determine the UAP’s absolute
position and flight characteristics. The sensor display does contain enough information to find a
speed, relative heading, and altitude of the UAP. These necessary pieces of information are the
elevation angle of the sensor, the azimuth angle of the sensor, the range from the F/A-18 to the
target, the F/A-18 altitude, the F/A-18 speed, and relative frame times. The sensor pod display
shows most of these values as integers, limiting the fidelity of the initial calculations2. The
display is shown in Figure 1 with these fields labeled.
Figure 3: One of the two frames used in the analysis with annotated fields indicate the data extracted from the
video and used in calculations.
To estimate the UAP speed, the first step was to determine its location at two positions separated
by a known time period. For this, the range to the target must be known. From 4232 seconds
until the end of the video, the tracker acquired a target track on the UAP, enabling the range to
be reported. Within this portion AARO focused its analysis on a 13-second excerpt from the
footage between 4239 seconds (“t1”) and 4252 seconds (“t2”). AARO selected this segment
because, between t1 and t2, the aircraft’s bank angle, altitude, and airspeed remained nearly
constant. This simplified the estimation of the F/A-18 flight characteristics due to the reduced
number of variables. At t1, the F/A-18’s range to the UAP was 4.0 NM and closed in range to
3.4 NM at t2.
2 Following sections will outline a methodology to estimate values with more precision.