I know that Russia generally doesn’t have hangar facilities to park their aircraft in, that this is one disadvantage that they have to live with.

But I have a hard time believing that they couldn’t get some kind of pavillion-type temporary structure or something. It seems like a major issue from an intelligence standpoint.

Like, if those aircraft vanished into a hangar and then came out two months later, maybe they’ve had parts swapped and they’re a good, new aircraft. We wouldn’t be able to tell from a satellite.

But because we can see all the work that Russia does on their warplanes, we can make some pretty good inferences about what they’re doing, even with low resolution. So that makes the problem a lot simpler – just identify which ones are the ones that we know don’t function. I suspect that it’s probably possible to – especially with military recon satellites, rather than the commercial stuff being used above – distinguish between individual aircraft, like by getting a side view of their tail sections.

For some stuff, they can maybe fly the aircraft to a facility that does have hangars. But they can’t do that if the aircraft was damaged badly enough that it can’t fly.