Hello readers! Today I will be attempting to solve Gralhix’s 16th OSINT exercise. This exercise presented a challenging OSINT investigation: identifying the real-world location of a U.S. Air Force A-10 aircraft. At first glance, the image seemed to contain very little information, but through targeted research I was able to uncover new contextual clues and narrow down possible locations.
Let’s get into it!
Exercise #016
Tasks:
On November 25, 2020, a Twitter user shared the photo below. It depicted a military aircraft flying over an “undisclosed location”.
- Your task is to disclose that location.
The first detail I noticed was that the image came from an X post, credited to Staff Sgt. Michael Battles. I decided to begin by researching the photographer.
Because the challenge was marked as “hard,” I doubted the original image would contain metadata, especially since it came from a military source. Still, I checked, just in case. As expected, nothing useful appeared.
Using X’s advanced search, I tried the exact phrase “An Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt II flies in an undisclosed location” and filtered from November 25, 2020 onward. This returned the post I was looking for. I saved the image locally for further checks.
Since no metadata was available, I pivoted to researching which Air Force bases host A-10 aircraft. Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona stood out, as it hosts the only formal A-10 training program. I scanned the surrounding terrain on Google Maps, but found no bodies of water matching the photo.
With no other leads and minimal clues from the image I proceeded to run it with Google Lens. This gave me three image results very similar to the one from our challenge.
I opened up that first result from Eurasia Review and learned this photo was related to Operation Inherent Resolve. It was originally taken on May 31, 2017 by Staff Sgt. Michael Battles.
Our second result from U.S. Air Forces Central contained a very similar image with the same background and body of water. It was a slightly different angle but it was taken the same day by Senior Airman Preston Webb.
However, the description of the image reads “over an undisclosed location in southwest Asia”. We are starting to get somewhere!
I decided to search the following in Google “Operation Inherent Resolve” and found CentCom.mil. We see another match to our image, taken by Staff Sgt. Michael Battles, it explains the relation to Operation Inherent Resolve.
Nothing new there except this website has a designated social media section and one more picture taken from a different angle by Sergeant Battles.
I could either check the social media for any new leads or I could do a reverse image search using the new image I found. I proceeded to check their instagram account but the oldest post was from 2019 so I pivoted to their Facebook page. Here I found another match for our image but it did not provide any new leads.
I took the new image and did a reverse image search with it but most of the results were A-10 in a similar angle. I am no photoshop expert so I used Photoroom to remove the aircraft since it was preventing me from getting the results I needed.
Using this edited image to search with Google Lens provided a ton of results of water bodies with similar color but only one capture my attention. This photo from Instagram seemed to be the same place from the bottom highlighted portion. The top left highlight has a V shaped that I thought would help me narrow down once I found it.
I am very confident this the right location but sadly I could not find anything that helped me confirm this. However, I have experienced before that adjusting the selected portion could reveal new results. This is when I adjusted it to only the bottom right section and found this other post.
Visiting the source site took us to a PDF file. The third page contains the image of interest to us and right above it we are provided with the coordinates to a “Field Trials”.
Now it’s time to navigate to those coordinates and see if we can match this to the second image we found from sergeant Battles.
Having found this location, I spent a lot of time tracing down every trail of water I could find. I even tried focusing on the green ones but even after finding all of these clues I could not find the right location.
I am not kidding when I say I tried EVERYTHING I could but I simply could not focus enough to find it. I ended up checking out Gralhix’s YouTube walkthrough.
I was only around 24.28 km away from solving this challenge on my own.
Solutions
- Your task is to disclose that location.
Solution: the coordinates are close to 37.66189942851443, 38.09426325597397.
Despite following multiple investigative leads I was unable to confirm the exact location on my own. While I made great progress uncovering connections to Operation Inherent Resolve and narrowing the search area, the final breakthrough came only after reviewing the solution provided by the original exercise author.
This was a valuable reminder that OSINT isn’t always about immediate success. It’s about building skills, experimenting with different methods, and learning from others’ approaches. Each attempt sharpens the toolkit for future investigations.
Thanks for staying with me until the end. I hope you picked up a few new ideas, and I look forward to tackling the next challenge with you!
Resources
- https://gralhix.com/list-of-osint-exercises/osint-exercise-016/
- https://x.com/search?q=%22An%20Air%20Force%20A-10%20Thunderbolt%20II%20flies%20in%20an%20undisclosed%20location%22%20since%3A2020-11-25&src=typed_query
- https://www.eurasiareview.com/19112017-follow-the-money-targeting-enemy-war-sustaining-activities-analysis/
- https://www.afcent.af.mil/Units/380th-Air-Expeditionary-Wing/News/Display/Article/1248932/victory-in-mosul-380th-aew-airmen-provide-vital-coalition-support/
- https://www.centcom.mil/MEDIA/SOCIAL-MEDIA/
- https://www.photoroom.com/tools/remove-object-from-photo
- https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/1086969/incirlik-airmen-feel-sense-of-accomplishment-in-counter-isis-battle/
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