OPS Battle For Pampus

Pampus is a small uninhabited island in the IJmeer with 12 portals on it. It is especially interesting for Ingress because it closes for 5 months each October. This year, leading up to the closing date all portals were blue and we were planning to visit the island on the last day to make sure they stayed that way. However, due to extremely foggy conditions nobody managed to access the island that day, so Pampus went into its winter sleep all blue.

Then ENL agent @Barreman managed to flip several portals from an aeroplane. A couple of days later @smurfenstein flipped some more, presumably from a boat, benefiting from an enormous GPS drift and even managed to link 5 of these portals together - an amazing (not to say unlikely) feat. Note from ENL agent @JamesCleaveland: Smurfenstein is not a known agent within the Amsterdam ENL community and a suspected spoofer.

Resistance were interested in making the island blue again for operation BlackLight so all sorts of ideas were generated on how to re-capture Pampus: smurfs in wet suits, speed boats, ramps, drones, boomerangs... In the end, following the dutch proverb 'beter goed gejat dan slecht bedacht', I decided to flip Pampus from the air.

Lelystad airport was the best option and an aeroplane was booked for December 11th, the day before operation BlackLight. Joining me on the flight was @AgentRoka who wouldn't want to miss the opportunity to flygress for the world.

The weather was not looking too good though. Low clouds and a stormy front closing in on Flevoland. After some debate we decided to just drive to the airport and hope for a window of opportunity to fly our mission.

We were lucky, the weather gods allowed us an hour of clear sky so we took off and flew to Pampus. Flipping portals from an aeroplane is HARD! As soon as we got confirmation from the operators on the ground that the necessary portals were flipped we headed back to base, our veins pumping with adrenaline. This was so cool! We did it!

The story of what happened the next day during operation BlackLight can be read in the sitrep. It's a sad thing that spoofers are able and willing to thwart large operations from their armchair with a treacherous mouse click. This wastes months of preparation, hours of farming and a lot of money but most importantly it ruins everybody's enjoyment in this game and destroys our trust that we can play in a fair arena. Cheating can ruin online games completely, I sure hope this does not happen to Ingress.

But I digress... Flipping portals from the air was a huge kick! A+, would try again. Thanks to all the awesome Ingress players that make this game such a fun ride. Thanks to @AgentRoka for taunting the blue skies with me. Thanks to @Oilpink and @MunchnetNL for keeping an eye out from the ground. Thanks to our pilot for landing us safely (on the second attempt). Thanks to ENL agent @Barreman for giving us a good reason to do this.

#Ingress #Resistance #Flygress #ResWUEIsAwesome  
+NIA Ops +Julia Vivienne Loverdose +Anne Beuttenmüller +Matilde Tusberti 

Photos