USAF Might Be Shooting Down Hobbyist Balloons 136
New submitter kalieaire writes: Steve Trimble of Aviation week reports that a Hobby Club's missing ballon might have been inadvertently targeted as a malicious UFO and subsequently shot down. When Scientific Balloon Solutions (SBS) company founder, Ron Meadows, reached out to Gov't resources at the FBI and DoD, they were brushed off. "I'm guessing probably they were pico balloons," said Tom Medlin, a retired FedEx engineer and co-host of the Amateur Radio Roundtable show. Merlin has three pico balloons in flight in the Northern and Southern hemispheres. According to Trimble, the description of all three UFOs shot down during 2/10-12 match the description of pico balloon models which can be purchased for $12-180 each, depending on the type. "Launching high-altitude, circumnavigational pico balloons has emerged only within the past decade," writes Trimble. He continues: Meadows and his son Lee discovered it was possible to calculate the amount of helium gas necessary to make a common latex balloon neutrally buoyant at altitudes above 43,000 ft. The balloons carry an 11-gram tracker on a tether, along with HF and VHF/UHF antennas to update their positions to ham radio receivers around the world. At any given moment, several dozen such balloons are aloft, with some circling the globe several times before they malfunction or fail for other reasons. The launch teams seldom recover their balloons.
The balloons can come in several forms. Some enthusiasts still use common, Mylar party balloons, with a set of published calculations to determine the amount of gas to inject. But the round-shaped Mylar balloons often are unable to ascend higher than 20,000-30,000 ft., so some pico balloonists have upgraded to different materials. [...] In fact, the pico balloons weigh less than 6 lb. and therefore are exempt from most FAA airspace restrictions, Meadows and Medlin said. Three countries -- North Korea, Yemen and the UK -- restrict transmissions from balloons in their airspace, so the community has integrated geofencing software into the tracking devices. The balloons still overfly the countries, but do not transmit their positions over their airspace. On Feb. 15, NSC spokesman John Kirby told reporters all three objects "could just be balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose," but he did not mention the possibility of pico balloons.
The balloons can come in several forms. Some enthusiasts still use common, Mylar party balloons, with a set of published calculations to determine the amount of gas to inject. But the round-shaped Mylar balloons often are unable to ascend higher than 20,000-30,000 ft., so some pico balloonists have upgraded to different materials. [...] In fact, the pico balloons weigh less than 6 lb. and therefore are exempt from most FAA airspace restrictions, Meadows and Medlin said. Three countries -- North Korea, Yemen and the UK -- restrict transmissions from balloons in their airspace, so the community has integrated geofencing software into the tracking devices. The balloons still overfly the countries, but do not transmit their positions over their airspace. On Feb. 15, NSC spokesman John Kirby told reporters all three objects "could just be balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose," but he did not mention the possibility of pico balloons.
Perhaps something to be regulated (Score:5, Interesting)
Sending up balloons to float in commercial airspace sounds like a really really dumb thing to do. While they wouldn't bring down a plane they'd could easily disable an engine if injested by one.
Re:Perhaps something to be regulated (Score:5, Informative)
While they wouldn't bring down a plane they'd could easily disable an engine if injested by one.
That seems unlikely. The mylar balloon isn't going to trouble a gas turbine, even if it made it into the core (unlikely). The tracker has a weight of 11g and is going to be mostly plastic, so while it could put a ding in a blade it's also not going to trouble the engine. The blades are actually damaged quite often by the ingestion of small items on the ground and it's a regular maintenance operation to have someone inspect each blade and file out any small dents or pits to stop crack formation/growth.
I guess if the balloon got into the air intake of a piston engine and blocked it up that could certainly be a problem, but it would be an extremely unlikely sequence of events for that to happen.
BTW, I imagine one of the reasons they have this exemption for balloons like this is because of weather balloons. I believe something on the order of 2000 of these get released around the world each day. They are vital to our modern weather modelling infrastructure.
Re: Perhaps something to be regulated (Score:3)
Sounds like you're talking about the Chicago Convention, which allows light balloons at high altitudes, exclusively for weather, to go unmolested. This isn't an FAA exemption, it's a UN treaty.
An FAA exemption would only apply to the US anyway, not international airspace.
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While they wouldn't bring down a plane they'd could easily disable an engine if injested by one.
That seems unlikely.
pico balloons are up to 8 feet wide [theguardian.com]. I'm no aircraft expert, but I wouldn't want that wrapped around a propeller or sucked into a jet engine.
Re:Perhaps something to be regulated (Score:5, Informative)
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Sure, because intelligence agencies care a lot about rules.
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It's not about the rules... it's about getting lost in the crowd.
A crowd of pico balloons, in this case.
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At $10 a pop they can make their own crowd.
Re:Perhaps something to be regulated (Score:5, Insightful)
You're talking about miniaturizing something the size of three school busses down to six pounds.
The Chinese "spy balloon" was technically a dirigible -- an airship with steering and propulsion. While that propulsion was limited, it enabled to the balloon, once in the general area, to steer itself over a target and maintain position long enough to collect data on activities at the site. It's going to be awfully hard to implement that kind of capability in a form factor that looks like an innocuous weather balloon. Don't you think the Chinese *would* have miniaturized their robot airship if that was feasible?
Pico? (Score:5, Funny)
What I don't understand is why they're pico-balloons if they weigh 10s of grams. That implies that a full balloon should weigh 10 million tonnes.
Re:Pico? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Pico? (Score:2)
Still easier to fly than the vim balloon.
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The emacs balloon would be so bloated it'd make a 747 look small, so vim balloon to the rescue!
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Not only that, but seems to me a max inflated diameter of about ten feet would be pretty obviously Not A Continent Crossing Design, therefore Not a Current Target.
Methinks this is Grasping At Straws to prove why we should not shoot down Large Stray Chinese Balloons of Unknown Payload.
Re:Perhaps something to be regulated (Score:5, Insightful)
Engines routinely ingest much worse without the slightest trouble. Get a grip.
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Utter BS. Anything solid injested into a gas turbine will do some damage which means the engine will need to be at least checked after landing before it flies again.
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Who said it wouldn't make sense to check them out...after they land in perfect safety. Like I said, get a grip.
Re:Perhaps something to be regulated (Score:4, Insightful)
There's more to it than just safety. If an engine blade is damaged it needs to be replaced; even if the aircraft lands perfectly safely. That means aircraft downtime, engine downtime, replacement parts and tools, and labor. And there's always the possibility that a diversion airport doesn't have a maintained depot; which means all of the above needs to be flown in. and ALL of that costs money. Even if that's inadvertent, there is a civil tort there. The people littering and damaging others' property need to be identifiable and held liable. Or just not allowed to litter in the first place.
Look at it from an automotive PoV. Running over a nail in the road won't crash my car. It might not even ruin the tire, depending on where exactly it got stuck. But even just a tire patch costs me money to have patched. And if some fuckwit was known (or has admitted) to going around town planting nails in the roadways for people to run over, things aren't going to work out well for him.
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Yep, which is why the FAA has issued a new directive to hunt down millions of birds that frequently enter controlled airspace without authorization and cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage every year. /s
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Which is why compressor blades are checked for foreign object damage routinely every few landings, while internal damage will be very quickly visible on myriad of sensors modern engines use to detect any anomalies.
Thing is, most of this damage comes from ingesting things like rubber from tyres of a plane that landed before yours, or parts of tarmac that got dislodged by a landing and braking. Sometimes it's also small parts of brake pads. All of these are way worse than a balloon of this kind, and engines a
Re:Perhaps something to be regulated (Score:5, Informative)
"One part of the amateur radio hobby is launching high altitude balloons with various radio and other payloads. Larger amateur radio balloons launched in the USA require FAA clearance, need a radar reflector attached, and usually continually transmit APRS telemetry before naturally popping and falling back to earth after a few hours, just like a weather balloon.
However there is also the simpler 'pico' ballooning hobby, which involves the use of mylar helium party balloons to launch small solar powered payloads that are only a few grams in weight. They typically transmit low power WSPR at HF frequencies and can only transmit whenever there is sufficient solar power available. Amateur radio or SDR hobbyist stations around the world can pick up these transmissions, and report them on amateur.sondehub.org and/or wsprnet.org. Well built balloons can totally circumnavigate the globe several times over several months before degrading.
While termed 'pico', the party balloons used can still be roughly a meter in diameter on the ground, with some latex balloons potentially expanding further at high altitudes due to the low atmospheric pressure. These balloons can be legally launched from almost anywhere in the world. In particular in the USA there is no FAA clearance required to launch them due to their payload being much less than the limit of 4 lbs (1.8kg). "
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/the-us... [rtl-sdr.com]
I doubt the equivalence of large party balloons would do more damage then e.g. any typical large bird.
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Sending up balloons to float in commercial airspace sounds like a really really dumb thing to do.
Two words: Weather balloons.
More generally, I imagine many (most?) of these types of balloons -- weather. hobby, etc... -- simply travel *through* commercial airspace, relatively briefly, to higher altitudes to conduct, or while conducting, their operations. I also imagine the return trip is even more brief.
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Weather balloons float up the atmosphere taking readings from the ground through 100,000+ feet. They rise through commercial airspace relatively quickly (generally selected around 20,000-40,000 feet) an
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Yep. I don't remember the exact numbers, but In the US alone, it's something like 90 weather service balloons...launched twice a day. Worldwide, I think it's over 1000. There's even a minor hobby revolving around people tracking, and recovering the radiosondes. There's an address to return them for reuse...or some people just keep them.
But...this is all a great example of how UN-aware people are of how much "stuff" is in the sky. It's a pretty clear demonstration of how theses things DON'T pose a stati
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Imho the main reason why people ask for things like "universal basic income" is because people don't actually think or know just how much work it is just to maintain the society as it is.
Weather balloons for accurate weather predictions, balancing water usage so that it's sufficient for everyone in each area, producing and balancing electric grid, getting waste collection to actually work, sewage, etc.
It's a tremendous amount of work to maintain a modern society. And it's a demonstration of excellence of pe
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Adding on to that a bit...people also assume that everyone else has the same boring lives that they do. The fact that there are hobbyists (or schools) out there, doing interesting things, is just absolutely unfathomable to them.
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In many ways, we are beings who only understand the world through the lens of ourselves. I.e. we're self aware.
But if you're self aware and not careful when you think about things, you end up projecting your own characteristics, tendencies, flaws and talents onto everything around you. And that leads to misunderstandings all the time.
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If planes are that dangerous, which they appear to be after all these years and still deaths, maybe aviation isn't safe and should be for emergencies only? After all, a plane crash doesn't just endanger those involved, they often kill innocent people on the ground.
Do we really need people flying around ruining the planet and endangering everyone nearby?
Re: Perhaps something to be regulated (Score:2)
Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
Politics 101, always take advantage of a crisis. When the people have a common fear then it is easy to pass more scoping laws, because there is less people willing to oppose it.
Politics 102, if there is no crisis, then create one.
Depending what echo chambers you prefer to live in, you are fed stories about those Evil Democrats, who are trying to turn the country into a godless entity, with a transition to communism, and trying to punish a race of people because of Wok. Due to a set of Straw-man and Sliding Scale arguments. Or those Maniacal Republicans, who are a bunch of white supremacists trying to isolate us from the rest of the world, and bring a fascist state where we pry to a single republican oligarch, and those who don't look or act like them will be brutally punished. Due to a set of cherry picking of the worst of the people in that party, and the few trouble makers who make the news for the damage they create. There are pliantly of made up crisis's. However for the most part most Americans kinda scoff at the idea of a Chinese Spy Balloons flying over head, so it makes it a lot easier to apply regulations against it, good or not.
Re: Nope (Score:2)
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Ah, the classic it's not really a problem b/c it doesn't exist fallacy. This relies on the audience having the memory of a goldf
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Given how fast we went from gay marriage to lecturing kindergarteners about gender theory
Show me the proof. Not some hearsay article on Fox that was written because they picked up something posted by LibsOfTikTok, and not some teacher who should've just been fired for going off the official lesson plans, but actual photos of the teacher edition textbooks or other official curriculum materials which are being used to teach such a topic.
This isn't like the issue of climate change where there's the possibility of ambiguity if you don't understand the science. With "lecturing kindergarteners abou
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And even if it were, one goal of AP courses is to teach students to think critically about ideas and compare the evidence that supports those ideas.
So, even IF CRT were in AP courses (which it isn't) these courses should be giving students the tools to examine the evidence for and against said theory to determine whether they think it accurately portrays the experience of race in the United States or has utility in understanding how the US has functioned.
There i
Re:Nope (Score:4, Informative)
Schumer didn't say that, according to https://thehill.com/homenews/s... [thehill.com], he claimed they were balloons and then said the Administration thought they were small balloons. That's just about the sum total of his remarks. You are the bullshitter.
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Didnt have 'Anon apologizes for accidental misinfo' on my slashdot bingo card this week.
Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, it's rare enough when anyone admits to mistaken information when presented with new information these days even when they aren't anonymous.
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Yeah but still.. (Score:2)
Re:Yeah but still.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I bet they still had "Made in PRC" written on them somewhere...
So does just about everything at Walmart.
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Just launch Walmart high into the air then and call the USAF about a new UFO.
Just Because You Are Paranoid (Score:1)
Doesn't mean they are after you.
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Your self worth has been over evaluated.
Economics (Score:4, Interesting)
All to shoot down a $12-180, off the shelf balloon.
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They won't, of course, (Why waste a "crisis" if you can finagle a higher budgetary allocation out of it?) but they *could* just take it out of the training budget. Air Force and Navy pilots fly regularly and routinely practice gunnery and bombing just to stay in practice in case they're called on to to do it for real. That pilot would, at some point, have flown his F-22 up and fired off a sidewinder anyway... just perhaps not off the north coast of Alaska.
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Ya know, it's kinda frightening (Score:2)
When I was a kid and Nena sang about 99 red balloons, we were mostly going "Yeah, calm down girl, nobody's gonna be stupid enough..."
Well... the times are a-changing...
Well played, China (Score:5, Interesting)
Sending the original balloon(s) over the USA has been far more successful than China ever imagined. They got to scare the shit out of the American public, freaked out the US military, caused political dissent inside the US about how to deal with it, and now has gotten the US Administration to overreact multiple times since, blowing shit up for no good reason and even admitting they don't even know what they were shooting down. And it's cost China nothing other than the balloon (as no one believes anything they say to begin with, so it's not like any trust was lost).
Only the likes of Bin Laden have been more successful with soliciting an American overreaction. Well played, indeed.
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Just the boost Americans needed.... shooting down hobbyists' balloons to avoid appearing weak to communist China.
Sigh.
Now we're telling folks in Ohio near the train wreck to calm down and trust the government.
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We can just tell them to trust the company running the trains or producing the chemicals if you prefer. Who invited the government into this matter?
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It's really what's being said. [theguardian.com]
The companies running the trains and making the chemicals are likely well into lawsuit-defense mode, so their words are as tainted as East Palestine.
Re: Well played, China (Score:2, Insightful)
The only reason Biden is doing this is because he got egg on his face the first time. He was too scared of Xi to shoot down the balloon they knew about for over a week, even his allies called him out on it. It was a political disaster, so now he needs to shoot at everything that moves. Politicians like that are big idiots surrounded by even bigger idiots.
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Why do you and your media cronies lie so much?
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Yeah cuz the current administration's stooges aren't just making that up to save face.
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The snowflakes are out in force, I see. Conservatives live in a state of perpetual fear. It's why they're always so ready to lash out.
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Re: Well played, China (Score:2)
Re:Well played, China (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, it's a pretty low bar.
EVERYTHING in America is about overreaction now.
A drug addict ex felon dies during arrest from a fentanyl overdose ignored because of the malignant arrogance of a truly shitty cop? Burn down our cities and try to get rid of police entirely.
A disease goes around that is slightly dangerous to old and overweight people? Close all the schools and crash the economy for two years.
0.01% of adult humans have a genuine gender-identity issue and are treated badly?
We need to embrace fetish-addicted pedophiles grinding their genitals in drag shows and reading to kindergartens in lingerie, start 100s of clinics dedicated to encouraging the faintest whiff of tween depression into permanent body-mutilating surgery and meanwhile wastebasket women and plain 'ol gay people in favor of insisting men can have babies and women can rape other women 'with their woman-penis'.
Yeah, we're not really a serious country now. Just a bunch of borderline illiterate, ignorant emotion engines programmed to outrage on cue when our faction tells us to be upset.
Re: Well played, China (Score:2)
You mean the one that was killing teens and children in large numbers? That disease?
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Are you deliberately lying, or just ignorant?
From Vox, which is a rather left-leaning publication:
https://www.vox.com/22699019/c... [vox.com]
"Another way to gauge risk is to compare Covid-19 to other significant causes of death. Covid-19 has killed 280 children under 18 from January through September 2021, the time span in which the alpha and delta variants were active. Flu and pneumonia, heart disease, drowning, guns, and motor vehicles were all deadlier to children during the same time periods annually from 2015 to
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Funny you disappeared when I showed serious scientific data.
Cat got your tongue?
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Trans men in drag however have DISTURBINGLY OFTEN proved to be sex offenders often against children. That is a simple fact.
(Granted, to me "disturbing" would be any number greater than zero. Would you agree?)
The first:
https://www.khou.com/article/n... [khou.com]
The second:
https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/u... [cbn.com]
Oh look, another!
https://thebridgehead.ca/2022/... [thebridgehead.ca]
Coincidence? Really?
I don't think ANYONE believes it. Some disregard it because politics or dogma > children.
After all, it's not normal people who are INSISTING
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They got to scare the shit out of the American public
The "American public" seemed mildly interested at best. At least based on those fellow Americans that I interact with every day.
I don't know if even the politicians actually cared all that much. They mainly seemed interested in turning this around and using it for their standard talking points - which is what they do with almost everything.
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Yeah, samo samo on the political talking points. If not balloons, it'd be something else. "Bemusement" is the typical reaction that I've seen.
Big Balloon (Score:2)
https://youtu.be/4RV3RXMNGVs?t... [youtu.be]
"Why did you think a big balloon would stop people?"
"Shut up, that's why!"
That's remarkable (Score:2)
circling the globe several times before they malfunction or fail for other reasons
I'm really amazed those thin-walled balloons are able to retain helium long enough to circumnavigate the globe several times. Helium is notoriously leaky due to the small molecule size.
Cool they can be arrested now (Score:2)
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You mean arrest the USAF pilots for destroying people's property and getting USAF to pay for the damage they've done?
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Negligence goes both ways.
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File a flight path. For a balloon.
Re: Cool they can be arrested now (Score:2)
No, he means the helium to blow them up was expensive. :-)
Balloon wars (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Balloon wars (Score:2)
Can't wait until the sky is darkened with 100s or thousands of penis shaped mylar balloons stolen from the hands of bachelorette parties everywhere.
Duh (Score:4, Interesting)
>"match the description of pico balloon models which can be purchased for $12-180 each,"
Yes, we all know.
It is an over-reaction to having done nothing to stop the one real spy balloon before it finished its mission by going all the way across the USA. So after being heavily criticized for inaction, they turned up the sensitivity of the radars (or threshold of what to worry about) and spend $400,000 a pop missiles to take down harmless stuff.
I mean, at a minimum we might could just use much, much cheaper-to-operate high-powered lasers to burn some small holes in these helium nothings and allow them to gently float down to the ground.
Watch the other hand... (Score:2)
Of course they're hobbyist balloons. There are probably dozens if not hundreds of hobbyist balloons floating around at any given time.
When the government is making a huge fuss about something so obviously inconsequential, it's like a magician making obvious gestures with one hand. While the other hand is...doing what?
What is it, that the US government is trying to distract people from noticing?
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Their new spy plane, probably.
Balloon Science (Score:2)
Not exactly something new: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sc... [dailymail.co.uk]
I don't know whether to laugh or be scared (Score:2)
Might? (Score:2)
Good for them (Score:2)
"The balloons still overfly the countries, but do not transmit their positions over their airspace. "
They store the data the collect and send them en bloc when reaching a safe space, just like real grown-up spy balloons.
Compared to RC planes? (Score:2)
They had to come for the balloons sooner or later, based on the over-regulation being applied to RC planes. Maybe ultralights will eventually be brought in line too and we'll at least have some consistency to the rules, despite the order of addressing these "problems" being arguably upside-down.
But for as many comments there are here that dismiss the threat from balloons, I seem to remember the model planes getting much less slack, probably due to drone-o-phobia.
South Korea violating US Airspace (Score:2)
We launched some of these (Score:2)
My local hackerspace did some of these quite a while ago. They were launched from a specific area designed for such things (I didn't attend the launches). Not sure what permissions were required to launch, but onced launched it was up to the wind where it went. One of them was about to enter the no fly zone in Iraq before it failed. We were kinda excited and fearful about what would happen if it got there.
But I think that shows the notion that such things can be regulated is quite rediculous. They can
Shoot down Make Sunsets' balloons (Score:2)
I want one of these (Score:2)
For fun, I checked out Project Picoballoon [picoballoon.org]. Forget the balloons, they're working on an automated gizmo which launches probes on a regular basis. I want one of those for my backyard, just to watch a new balloon hatch every day.
Whether these folks are going to accomplish anything useful, well, that's not for me to say. Looks fun though.
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To their defense, the code shows "300 mW". Some CSS designer decided to put text-transform: uppercase on it though... ;)
Yeah, I chuckled at that too. I wonder how fast the sensor package would vaporize if 300 MW went through it. Shoot, even 300 watts isn't going to do it a lot of good.
Ok, I don't have to buy anyone a drink (Score:2)
Days ago, after they shot down the octagonal balloon, I said hobbyists and/or jokers.
Which is what a lot of these are. Wonder how many high-schoolers are po'd at loosing their experiment for the science fair.
I said that on Reddit... (Score:2)
I am laughing so hard at this.
I said that very thing on Reddit when it was posted as a news reference to "china spy balloon".
to an old electronics fart like myself, it looked like amateur work, you could see the random solar panels "soldered" together in cluster arrays, and the glue paint that was stuck to the balloon from "I don't care" type of work, and got downvoted to oblivion.
No one wanted to believe it was amateurs, even though the crystal clear footage they had was so easy to see all the work that wa
Just One Problem (Score:2)
AIM-9X missiles, the ones reported to have shot down the last balloon, are infrared heat-seaking missiles. Balloons offer no heat to seak. Even AMRAAMs need a much larger radar cross-section to achieve a lock.
The Air Force has no missiles that will lock and destroy a 4lb balloon.
It had to have been considerably larger even for a radar-guided missile to hit it.
How am I just discovering this? (Score:2)
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The balloon that started this was tracked from launch out of China
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
"By the time a Chinese spy balloon crossed into American airspace late last month, U.S. military and intelligence agencies had been tracking it for nearly a week, watching as it lifted off from its home base on Hainan Island near China’s south coast."
Why wasn't it shot down when it entered Alaskan airspace over the Aleutians?
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Because they were afraid it might contain something toxic. So they waited until it was off coast again.
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> The balloon that started this was tracked from launch out of China
Yeah, didn't make sense it wasn't tracked. Thanks for the link.
> Why wasn't it shot down when it entered Alaskan airspace over the Aleutians?
NORAD said it wasn't reported as a threat, like blackomegax wrote SIGINT, and it seems to be something the relevant departments find useful and prefer not to elaborate on.
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