ST. JOSEPH, Mo. -- The Missouri Air National Guard’s 139th Operations Group completed a four-day exercise from May 12-15, 2025 named Operations Goes Dark, designed to simulate the effects of a cyber attack. During the exercise, aircrews and support personnel operated without access to internet, GPS, phones (landline or cellular), or networked printers — simulating a degraded environment they could face during real-world deployments.
The exercise began with a simulated cyber attack notification issued via a base page to the squadron building, alerting personnel that all communications were degraded. This was quickly followed by a briefing from the intelligence section detailing the impact of the attack on squadron operations.
Crews faced challenges during mission planning. Without internet access, they couldn’t determine forecasted wind speeds to accurately calculate time en route. Instead, they used printed maps showing zero-wind calculations and relied on the aircraft’s onboard systems to determine wind speed in real time.
Although the focus was on flight operations, the exercise also highlighted the importance of support elements. The Aviation Resource Management Office was instrumental in generating flight authorizations and ensuring aircrew met all legal and safety requirements.
“The flying portion was such a small portion of it. We have our flying role, but there's so many people in operations that are not in the airplane that do a lot of things in order to get us out the door so kudos to everybody that stepped up to do those things for us,” said Capt. Kyle Hutchison, a pilot assigned to the 180th Airlift Squadron who also was the planner of the exercise. “They do so many things that aircrew don't typically think about. That has a huge impact on the mission.”
The exercise was also a proof of concept to test the practicality of satellite phones. In regional outages where traditional communication fails, satellite phones can be used to call outside regions and retrieve critical information such as NOTAMs and file flight plans.
Due to the simulated loss of communication with the control tower, crews looked for light gun signals — a backup method that signals aircraft whether to land, taxi, or hold short.
Some of the sorties included low-level, formation flying and airdrops. For airdrop coordination, where crews normally rely on radio contact with ground personnel, pre-established visual signals were used instead. Rules of engagement were developed to determine when it was safe to drop based on those signals. Real-world emergency communication remained in place to ensure safety.
“Both airplanes successfully dropped four actual air drops, heavy equipment and Container Delivery Systems both on the dropzone safely, so no real degradation to our mission,” said Lt. Col. Cade Keenan, commander of the 180th Airlift Squadron, who flew during one of the days of the exercise.
In some cases, Airmen even had to physically walk to the maintenance and aerial port sections to gather load information and aircraft status — a reminder of how communication breaks down without digital tools.
“It's forcing people to step out of their comfort zone and maybe doing something that they're not used to doing,” Hutchison said.
One of the challenges was flying the C-130 aircraft without GPS. Crews had to rely on inertial navigation systems and visual references to navigate and meet mission objectives — skills not often used in modern environments but still vital.
“We did a visual update over a known location of a source, in this case, over the runway,” said Keenan. “We…marked that location, compared it to how the inertial navigation systems naturally drift over time. So we updated our navigation system without GPS.”
The success of Operations Goes Dark reinforced the importance of flexibility and innovation in the face of digital disruption.