Hobby Club’s Missing Balloon Feared Shot Down by USAF
aviationweek.com
aviationweek.com
That's an interesting collection of countries. Why I wonder the UK and not other Western countries?
Actually no.
You CAN listen to it. Anyone is free to buy a scanner.
You CANNOT record it or redistribute it.
"Technically possible" doesn't always mean "legally permissible."
In the UK if a radio device is 'inherently incapable of transmission', you do not need a licence to install or use it. A scanner is very much that.
It is legal to use a scanner in the UK as long as it is clear from the context that the message being listened to was intended for general reception. There are many circumstances in aviation where this could be the case.
See https://www.ofcom.org.uk/spectrum/interference-enforcement/r...
That's basically how the actual law on this matter is worded, i.e. "don't listen, but if you did listen, don't tell anyone".
Section 48, Wireless Telegraphy Act[1], notice the clever little "or" at the end of (1)(a).
So 48(1) is telling you: "don't use it with intent"(1)(a), but if you do don't be that person who "discloses information"(1)(b).
Not quite so black and white.
One easy example I can think of in the UK is uncontrolled/semi-controlled airspace (class E/G) and uncontrolled airfields. Parties transmitting on those frequencies are basically sending broadcast messages for the benefit of anyone listening in order to inform those unknown parties of their location and intentions.
See also, for example, this reply to an FOI request[1], I quote:
Whether or not an aeronautical transmission was intended for general reception would depend on all of the circumstances of the transmission. We cannot therefore say, generally, whether or not listening to these transmissions would be an offence.
[1] https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/air_band_listening_an...
Transmitting to ATC is of course quite a different thing.
Oi, you got a loicense for that television receiver, mate?
You need a license to receive a television programme service, which I believe is defined as a service being transmitted by an ofcom registered television station.
Honestly, the concept of this being illegal is shocking to me. I had assumed recording/playback of ATC comms was essentially a universal standard practice (minus Military, police ops, etc.) to help with education and training. It seems like a terrible shame that the UK would have such a strange rule barring it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@VASAviation
Yes
> are we talking some 5 pound fine, or is that something closer to an arrestable offense?
In the UK criminal offences are generally dealt with reasonably softly, i.e. within the context of the criminal and the severity of the crime.
With something like this, which would be a criminal offence similar to re-distributing paid TV services you would normally just go through various levels of fine depending on severity/scale.
So a website explicitly setup to distribute recordings could expect quite a heavy fine because (a) they were knowingly doing it, and (b) they were distributing to a large global audience.
Chances of being arrested on this sort of offence in the UK is highly unlikely. Maybe if you were a repeat offender you might leave them with little choice, but that's probably the only scenario.
It's worth pointing out that it's almost impossible to get Ofcom to prosecute you for anything to do with receiving and recording radio traffic, or even transmitting illegally, as long as you're not making a nuisance of yourself.
This is generally how laws work in the UK. You can do it right up to the point at which it pisses people off enough that the legal system has to act.
Not only is it legal but many police forces around the country use this site to keep an eye on the traffic. At least they did more than a decade ago.
I'm also not sure if this is a system that's legally protected or that the government simply hasn't bothered trying to take these sites down.
P2000 is one way and based on FLEX, a paging protocol. It's indeed only used for fire and ambulance. The police data is too sensitive so they use C2000. Though you will see police traffic related to accidents etc.
But no P2000 isn't protected and the government even used that website themselves :) Not officially though, I guess.
I think this is also because most fire departments use a lot of volunteers which makes their activities a lot more public.
They're used for alerting rather than paging, in that the message is four flashing LEDs and a lot of beeping rather than a description of the incident, and as such the paging transmitters just transmit a unique number rather than a message. The message is always "get to the fire station right now".
The Rundfunkbeitrag is applied per household, not based on devices, and it's up to each person to either pay the tax or justify to the Beitragsservice that they don't need to.
Yeah, it's a pretty shitty system and I wish we would get rid of it. Don't have high hopes of that happening anytime soon though.
Their existence was not[0]. Maybe they didn't work. It sounds like they may have been a paper tiger.
Yeah, italy - putting the license fee in the electricity bills.
“ Modern efforts to detect licence evasion are shrouded in mystery. Modern flatscreen displays receiving digital television signals do not emit as much radio frequency interference as older designs, and any such signals detected are less easily correlated with broadcast television. An LCD television in the home can just as easily be displaying output from a video game console or an online streaming service, with both being usage cases that do not require the owner to pay a licence fee. Based on an alleged BBC submission for a search warrant in recent years, there may be optical methods used in which reflected light from a television in a viewer’s home is compared to a live broadcast signal. The BBC declined to answer the Freedom of Information request with any details of their methods, other than to say they have employed vehicles and handheld devices in enforcement efforts.”
https://hackaday.com/2021/01/18/tv-detector-vans-once-prowle...
The inspectors can't do much if you refuse to identify or incriminate yourself.
(After many years of public broadcasting being charged if you have a TV -- or even a PC or mobile phone with TV capability -- the charges now go through the normal tax system, so you no longer have to worry about the real TV inspection people asking to come in to see if you have a TV!).
You could just about make a speculative case for IF and flyback transmission in the old analogue days, although triangulation would have been a serious problem.
Today's digital systems are much quieter.
But the best argument is that even if they worked it wouldn't make a difference. A large team of inspectors has a list of properties without a license and they're checked in person. A complex detector van does nothing to make this easier - as proven by the complete lack of detector evidence in court cases.
They almost certainly did not work as intended, particularly if you had more than one TV in a 100-metre radius of the van.
Superheterodyne receivers including the ones in TVs have a local oscillator that's mixed with the received signal. This oscillator leaks out a bit and can be detected at short ranges.
These days there's much more interference and TV is not distributed over the air anymore usually. So it is no longer a thing.
The thing is though, it's usually not needed. All they have to do is go to the houses without a license and either look through the window or listen for the sounds of a TV show.
I wish they'd just abandon the concept of a TV License though. Everyone has a media capable device these days and the administrative load of all this license crap is not worth the savings for the 5 people that really don't have a TV. In other words, just take it out of the taxes.
In the Netherlands they have done this for decades but when I lived in Ireland there was still a really expensive license. For which you get 2 really mediocre channels (IMHO)
The funny thing was the ads on TV. They focused not so much on the huge fine of more than a thousand euros but on the shame of being seen in court without a license. As if anyone gives a F... Lol. Piracy was really rampant when I was there and people even networked their wifis together over long distances to share movies.
But apparently tv detector van evidence was used for search warrants that then lead to further evidence that was used in prosecution.
Yes. The primary purpose of the tv detector vans was fearmongering.
But they did exist (in small numbers), and they were at least semi-functional.
I don't think that's intentionally introduced. My understanding was that mains hum in any grid is an artifact of a noisy signal that just happens to be useful as a forensics fingerprint.
https://www.kccscientific.com/the-dirty-little-secret-about-...
There are 3 levels, Foundation through to Full which come with different privileges. You can achieve a lot with the basic Foundation.
In terms of airborne transmitting - yes the UK is an outlier. It is forbidden to make amateur radio transmissions in the air over the UK, or use a UK licence to do so anywhere I think. The key word here is amateur - so specifically on those bands and with that licence. I think the ISM bands would be fine - and there are balloon projects and clubs in the UK.
I have a Finnish amateur licence in parallel and that doesn't have this restriction but naturally it would still not be allowed to use it to transmit from an aircraft over the UK. And even if it were to be elsewhere there are still some rules surrounding that, and it's hopefully obvious that you need permission of whoever's in charge of the aircraft.
Pretty much the missing word here is ... UNLICENSED.
Yemen and NK ban amateur radio outright, with very few exceptions for things like DXpeditions or royalty.
No other countries specifically call out a prohibition of airborne amateur radio operation; either they explicitly allow it or they don't specify.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23803850
[PDF] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0026/82637/a...
Informally i’ve had nothing but condescending dismissal on airborne operation because i mentioned some experiments involving a drone (my other hobby).
Meanwhile Ofcom's unofficial position is that they literally cannot be paid to investigate things that happen on the amateur bands, and don't much care what you do anywhere else as long as you're not making a nuisance of yourself.
probably because the gov't hates competition.
Edit: I uploaded video from the flight here: https://youtu.be/4jCU6kVOmc4
Since you mention muons and their detection, I would expect some university (I used to be a physicist)
I helped with some of the comms software, but they did most of the other software themselves too. As for the balloon, again, they did that themselves - they rented the helium cylinder, researched the regulations, how to get a NOTAM issued, arranged the use of a disused airfied as a launch site, phoned air traffic control to get final permission to launch, etc. Beforehand, they did all the testing they could manage without being airborne, and got the hang of driving the sdr dongles they used to receive the two RTTY streams. They also discovered GPRS transmissions really interfered with the Muon amplifier, but that wasn't a big issue if it was only turned on for landing.
On the day, the main thing the two parents did was drive the two chase cars, as the kids hadn't got a driving license. Most things went right first time. They had two redundant GPS receivers and two RTTY transmitters, running completely separate software, one on a raspberry pi zero, and one on a teensy. The GPS chipsets need configuring into high altitude mode, or they stop working above 10,000 meters. But this is impossible to test in advance. The RTTY transmitter that was relaying the Muon results gave a much higher bit error rate than the second one, but the second one's GPS chipset turned out to not be in high altitude mode. The balloon sprang a leak at 16,000 m, and descended gently afterwards. We had been aiming for the expected landing site, and as it dropped back into the jetstream, it started to get away from us, despite us driving as fast as we dared with a large antenna on the car roof. Fortunately two other HAB guys were receiving too, and relaying position information back as we started to hit the limits of what we could receive from the working GPS. As the balloon descended the second GPS came back to life, and we were able to track again until it dropped too low. In the end we got to within a kilometer of where it landed, but the reason we recovered it quickly in the end was because the lovely lady whose pigsty it landed in phoned the number on the payload.
My children went to a high school in France which is ranked in the national top 3 (the ranking fluctuates between these schools depending on the year and the detailed calculation).
There have never even been a project that was in any way close to the one your children did. Was that a "normal" project, ore one you work on by choice over a few years? Or one you do as part of a club (but holy shit - what club that must be!)
For one our education is way, way too theoretical (and basically useless once you learn ans pass the test) and then when I look at the "projects" they did, they look like kindergarten 2nd year marvels.
Hats off to your children!
EDIT: you should publish this in some competition for children
It wasn't the only project he did at school. When he was 14 or 15, they competed to build a solar still for water desalination - his included a solar panel driving a small pump to recirculate water to increase evaporation, an ultrasonic humidifier and a peltier cooler to improve condensation. It actually worked pretty well, but they didn't win. I think the judges thought they had too much parental involvement, but they didn't really.
Then when he was 16, with a different group, they entered a BP-sponsored competition with the brief "imagine the petrol station of the future". They didn't like the brief, and built a "self driving car" (basically a robot car that could follow a wall, based on a Bigtrak toy), and designed, built and tested an inductive charging system for it that could detect the car driving over coils embedded in the road, and turn on the coils in sequence as the robot drove past. I advised them on the robot software, but they did the rest. The analog electronics of coupled coils turned out to be hard, but they got it tuned in the end. It couldn't quite supply enough power to keep the car driving indefinitely, but did extend the range somewhat. That took them a bit more time, but they did win the national competition with that and got to present the project to the CEO of BP. A few weeks later BP announced a project on wireless charging for vehicles - maybe coincidence, but who knows?
It's easy to underestimate what young people are capable of, given all the information available online today.
They might shoot it down but I'd personally consider that a badge of honor. Pissing off the worst dictatorship in the world and getting them to waste at least 50k$ on a jet sortie for a few hundred bucks worth of hobby balloon sounds like money well spent.
I'm not into ballooning but I'm surprised they actually obey this. The UK is another matter of course.
I doubt a balloon with a circuit board could cause an engine to fail, but there are lots of sensitive measurement devices, like a pitot tube, that I imagine could fail if a balloon hit it. (For reference, Aeroperu 603 was brought down by tape that wasn't removed from the plane.)
I'm all about hobbyists hobbying, but it does seem like there should be at least some so of registration system so we know what people are launching into shared airspace.
True enough for the extremely risk-averse FAA.
> there are lots of sensitive measurement devices, like a pitot tube, that I imagine could fail if a balloon hit it. (For reference, Aeroperu 603 was brought down by tape that wasn't removed from the plane.)
Tape over all of the multiply-redundant static ports on the aircraft. We don't treat tape as a critical threat to aircraft.
The 737-MAX has three pitot tubes and six static ports, deliberately placed on both sides of the aircraft. (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Boeing-737-NG-and-MAX-pr...)
Thats just a 2lb drone and it rips into the leading edge of a small craft, imagine at 500+ mph.
Another good example is the Columbia disaster; it was just a piece of foam
Icy foam knocking a tile loose is not a critical problem for an airplane.
> The above poster is saying that even small problems can lead to catastrophic consequences in complicated machines.
That's a very generic statement. Are you sure that was their real point? Not something more specific to air strikes?
If a drone penetrates the wing, we don't really know if it can make it to the fuel tank when it hits at 500...
Sure, but they picked an example that's outside of this kind of aircraft's spec, so it's not clear that it's applicable. Bad examples deserve to be called out.
If it penetrates the wing, can it hit the fuel tank?
And 6lb of metal hits different than 6lb of goose, depending on what it hits. Hail can destroy a radome.
In the case of Aeroperu, it was being serviced, and so _all_ the static ports were taped over with duct tape. Which is an extremely unusual maintenance procedure and resulting failure mode, and in flight you wouldn't expect all of them to fail simultaneously, even after an impact with an foreign object.
And critically, in their case, the ground radar warning system was working; however, due to all the other failures and alarms occurring on the flight deck, they did not notice or did not pay attention to this alarm.
Modern aviation is so filled with redundancies and double checks that most disasters are the result of a long sequence of chained failures, and not due to a single piece of equipment becoming inoperative.
Sure, it _could_ happen with a single bird, but it probably won't.
Now they have to send them into the 'most critical area' of the engine, but depending on engine size the largest bird tested could still be 4 or 6 lbs.
[1] https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/accidentreports/reports/...
And I guess cleaning up afterward also?
Not for ingesting a large Mylar balloon with a mass tied to one end, necessarily.
If I’m remembering correctly, I think the typical “speed limit” is 250 kts below Class A airspace, which is a far cry from a Mach number.
edit: I also recall that the testing allows for destruction of the engine as long as shrapnel does not penetrate the fuselage. Engines are not happy ingesting a goose regardless of speed or altitude. There’s a liner surrounding the turbine blades the must remain intact to pass the test.
One engineer suggests that they probably defrost the chicken first.
Most likely.
Even more so for lighter than air aircraft. An airliner traveling at Mach 0.8 would most most likely push this tiny thing out of the way like a feather even if it was in the flight path.
Note that, regarding your pitot tube example, they are _pointy_. And heated. Assuming the balloon would even be hit and have its fabric intact, it would still be punched right through.
Remember, 90000 pound aircraft traveling at Mach 0.8 (for an average 737) against a lighter than air balloon where the most rigid components are small circuit boards and thin solar panels. There isn't even an electronics case in most instances.
Maybe engines would ingest it, but they wouldn't even notice.
Someone once told me, but I can't remember whether it was an aviator or an ornithologist, that a bird with a metal ring on its leg could cause total destruction of a jet engine. Of course they don't attach metal rings to birds any more and haven't done so for a long time, and I'm not sure how big the risk was even with the chunkiest of old-fashioned rings.
(What about a bird with an arrow stuck through it, I wonder? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfeilstorch )
>they wouldn't even notice
What?
Imagine an aircraft sitting stationary on the runway and you fire a circuit board at it at mach 0.8, which is 988km/h or 274m/s. It's the same thing.
From google, an arduino pro micro, which is a small circuit board, about the size of a usb flash drive, weighs 13g.
From wikipedia, a .22 bullet weighs 1.3 to 3.9 g, so about 1/10 of that small circuit board, and goes at a velocity of 175 to 533 m/s.
Do you really think that's safe?
Would you be happy to fly in a plane where they shot at it with ten rifles before you get in?
If these have low radar signature, and they are below 60k feet then they could be a problem at least at night, and maybe during the day too
It's because that's half the weight of a Canadian Goose.
"As part of the required certification testing, the GE90 successfully completed both the 2.5 and 8 lb. (1.13 and 3.63 kg) bird ingestion tests on the engine’s composite blades. In October 94, four 2.5 lb. birds were ingested with the engine running at speeds required to produce 85,000 lb. (377.8 kN) of thrust at takeoff on a hot day. There was no thrust loss and the engine responded to all throttle commands during the required 20 minutes of operation following the ingestion."
https://www.easa.europa.eu/en/downloads/7799/en https://www.kimerius.com/app/download/5781574315/The+GE90+-+...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNqU8jfAJMQ
Here's that didn't take down the plane, but made a big hole in the canopy spewing blood and guts all over the person in the back seat with the body hitting them in the shoulder.
That small drones and hobby R/C planes need fucking transponders in the US is bloody insane.
Seeing aliens or Soviets in every birthday balloon that escapes into the wild blue yonder is ridiculous.
aluminum has real advantages though
They're just typically not used with such precision because of the sheer amount of false positives they'd generate and how little concern there typically is about something so small.
Navy guys claimed it could track a baseball in orbit.
Is it really impressive? Modern stealth fighters have a radar signature smaller than small birds.
But as Donald Rumsfeld famously said: "we can destroy a bomb placed under a pedestrian footbridge from 6,000 miles away without destroying the bridge."
So really, who knows.
“I tried contacting our military and the FBI—and just got the runaround—to try to enlighten them on what a lot of these things probably are. And they’re going to look not too intelligent to be shooting them down,” says Ron Meadows, the founder of Scientific Balloon Solutions (SBS), a Silicon Valley company that makes purpose-built pico balloons for hobbyists, educators and scientists.
In other news:
Biden wants ‘sharper rules’ on unknown aerial objects
https://apnews.com/article/biden-politics-united-states-gove...
This guy should be thankful he's not in prison yet, even though he should be.
That guy's hobby needs a talented spokesperson right now, and he definitely is not it.
Of course the balloons must transition but it goes quite fast.
Randomly found reference: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/13/1156498101/ufos-unidentified-...
That's awfully nasty and blood thirsty. Thousands of weather balloons are launched very day, they are usually even more massive. These balloons are within the parameters that are explicitly permitted and are believed to be safe by the FAA.
Not everything unfamiliar to you personally is a threat.
Not everyone who does something which you haven't personally deemed safe deserves to be locked in a cage.
Seems like we weren't even really looking for balloons until recently. Now that we've noticed the Chinese Spy balloon, we're reviewing radar logs with refined analysis and are finding some in the past. So we don't really know the characterization of this potential threat. Our ability to positively ID things in this realm is still developing. Until it's a matured discipline, seems reasonable to act with an abundance of caution.
Even if the military could positively ID a pico balloon as such, who's to say pico balloons couldn't be used for nefarious purposes? Purposes still warranting being shot down? I could see the hobby moving to align with drones -- requiring FAA registration and a transponder. That seems like a solution that would allow well-intentioned pico balloons to continue operating and allow military to more easily discern: friend or foe?
Almost certainly not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity_in_the_Unit...
That doesn't mean that they would win such a lawsuit, however.
Cops regularly get qualified immunity for absolutely egregious conduct. The military is not going to get successfully sued for shooting down a $12 balloon while acting in good faith on national security duties.
Again, you may want to carefully read the article you linked, and linked articles within such as the one on the Federal Tort Claims Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Tort_Claims_Act
The decision here would be "there's no clearly established law that the US can't shoot down a balloon with an F-22" on qualified immunity grounds.
The president can't be sued over official actions. Your suit would just be thrown out.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-2/sec...
I assume the reason nobody seems to be eager to claim these downed balloons is fear of their liability for flying unregistered, transponder-less hazards to other flights.
It's hard to argue that if the government can't identify something operating in controlled airspace that it can't take measures pretty solidly in the realm of "national defense," up to and including blowing it up.
Even if they aren't, you just need permission from whoever controls your airspace (call them 20 minutes ahead of time) and only launch if there is very good visibility around the ascent path.
Hashtag-its-complicated.
To a first approximation: no. The US scrambling a fighter to blast a plane full of people out of the sky would be a huge mess and incur significant lawsuits.
Refining the approximation: militaries accepts the burden of responsibility to protect their people from threats, including airborne threats. Airborne threats are already traveling with significant potential (and often kinetic) energies so they are default-threatening. So militaries have wide discretion to presume an aircraft with no transponder is hostile and respond appropriately. A lawsuit on that topic would land somewhere between "no compensation" and "Sorry kids; Uncle Sam had to blow up your project to protect mom and apple pie; here's the money for the cost of the mylar and radio parts."
At the boundary-limit of the responsibilities, you can find disasters like the tragedy of Korean Airlines (KAL) flight 007, where Soviet planes failed to establish contact with a commercial airliner and shot it out of the sky.
https://www.icao.int/Meetings/anconf12/Document%20Archive/an...
Appendix 4 - Unmanned free balloons
2.1 An unmanned free balloon shall not be operated without appropriate authorization from the State from which the launch is made.
2.2 An unmanned free balloon, other than a light balloon used exclusively for meteorological purposes and operated in the manner prescribed by the appropriate authority, shall not be operated across the territory of another State without appropriate authorization from the other State concerned.
2.3 The authorization referred to in 2.2 shall be obtained prior to the launching of the balloon if there is reasonable expectation, when planning the operation, that the balloon may drift into airspace over the territory of another State. Such authorization may be obtained for a series of balloon flights or for a particular type of recurring flight, e.g. atmospheric research balloon flights.
2.4 An unmanned free balloon shall be operated in accordance with conditions specified by the State of Registry and the State(s) expected to be overflown.
---
Section 2.2 and 2.3 is applicable here. That they didn't know, and the government didn't know, and this wasn't a exclusively used as a weather balloon... there are possibly some things that the hobbyists did that may not have been completely within the bounds of the treaty.
There are also things like:
FAA guidance - https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/atc_html...
Given the geopolitical moment, I'm inclined to think it might work out for the best if that were so.
Not that today's neocon China hawks are any more in the habit of listening to reason than they were when they were the neocon Iraq hawks of a couple of decades ago, but anything that gives everyone else another reason not to listen to their incessant warmongering is in my view entirely welcome.
While this is applicable for balloons with a larger payload (that the size of the balloon was specifically under to be unregulated) ... https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/atc_html...
Post the balloon flight on flight progress strips along the planned trajectory and revise routing as tracking/position reports require.
Radar flight follow balloons to the extent that equipment capabilities permit. If radar flight following is not possible, tracking should be attempted by communication with the “chase plane,” telephone contact with the operator, pilot, or ground observation reports.
Provide traffic advisories to all affected aircraft during initial contact specifying the balloon's known or estimated position, direction of movement, and altitude as “unknown” or “reported,” as appropriate.
Unless ATC requires otherwise, operators of unmanned free balloons are required to monitor the course of the balloon and record its position at least every two hours. As required in 14 CFR Section 101.39a, balloon position reports are not forwarded by the operator unless requested by ATC.
UNMANNED FREE BALLOON OVER (name of location),
or
ESTIMATED OVER (name of location), MOVING
(direction of movement).
LAST REPORTED ALTITUDE AT (altitude as reported by the operator or determined from pilot report),
or
ALTITUDE UNKNOWN.
If this was followed, and someone could say "there's a balloon near this location which is similar to the last reported location of Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade balloon 12345" this probably wouldn't have happened.
As it is, they're getting into the airspace used by airliners at a time when peoples' hackles are raised with unknown balloons.
As it is, this still falls under the Chicago Convention.
> 2.2 An unmanned free balloon, other than a light balloon used exclusively for meteorological purposes and operated in the manner prescribed by the appropriate authority, shall not be operated across the territory of another State without appropriate authorization from the other State concerned.
> 2.3 The authorization referred to in 2.2 shall be obtained prior to the launching of the balloon if there is reasonable expectation, when planning the operation, that the balloon may drift into airspace over the territory of another State. Such authorization may be obtained for a series of balloon flights or for a particular type of recurring flight, e.g. atmospheric research balloon flights.
This is not exclusively a meteorological balloon. It is not getting authorization from the airspace it drifts into. That is not being done prior to a launch and as it travels.
And so, the question that I'll ask - "did the people launching balloon obtain permission to launch from the United States and prior permission for countries that it passed over?"
This isn't exclusively a weather balloon - which has a different carve out for permissions.
But it is an aircraft that traveled internationally and through the airspace of multiple different countries.
Plus, who wouldn't be proud to be able to claim "I launched something that was shot down by an F-22!"?
The Supreme Court is not going to intervene here in matters of military discretion, and no one is going to be able to sue here over this.
Oh yeah?! Him and what army?!
> The U.S. Army.
Oh that's a good army.
There's no reasonable expectation of recovery when you launch a balloon calibrated to go globe-trotting.
It's basically no different than the person who abandoned a mattress at my apartment block's dumpster. It's littering. They're giving it away, they're not expecting to be able to come back for it later.
Furthermore, nobody has a right to unregistered, unmanned, long duration balloon flight. Such a right would only exist if a state constructed it for its citizens. (and it would end at their boundaries)
I think it's cool that in practice people have been able to do so, but it seems the cool times are coming to an end.
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/atc_html...
Also, might be good to look into putting a device that will broadcast its location via radio or radar. I believe that above 60k feet airspace is unrestricted, but up till there it might be a good idea
Plus a broadcast signal might scream "This isn't a spy balloon" to USAF lol
From some posts there it looks like even beginner gear can get images from the NOAA weather satellites.
Pico balloon payloads look like this: https://www.rmham.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/IMG_5385-sc...
Most ADS-B transponders are substantially larger than the entire payload.
It should be possible to make a tiny, cheap ADS-B transponder. They are similar to APRS, with GPS and VHF radio. But there really isn't a market now for small ones, and there are regulations that make expensive.
It is hard for fighter pilots to observe small objects passing by them at high speed. I also suspect that they will see balloon as interesting object when can't see the payload.
Is this 6 pound rule up to date with the weight of actual surveillance and broadcast equipment? Feels like you could do a lot with 6 lbs.
Isn’t that also true in the US, and virtually everywhere?
Way to overreact, USA. It feels like they're just looking for excuses to escalate the situation with China. As if what's going on already in the rest of the world wasn't enough.
the coldwar style of conflict we're living, the harmless Luftballons auf ihrem weg zu Hoziron (compared to UFOs), and the fighter pilots who're "going to look not too intelligent to be shooting them down" make it really look like that song.
now let's find out if we reach 99 luftballons, or some Dr Strangelove thing first
( a year before Nena made their song, NATO made an exercise with a plot that went all the way to using nuclear bombs _Able Archer 83_, and the Soviets almost retaliated to false warnings of ICBMs launches, that were issued by a computer that couldn't be wrong)
How far are we actually from there with China ?
Of course that the propaganda machine won't touch the Air Force (or the US military more generally) not even with a feather, it's full "the Emperor's clothes are all so wonderful!"-mode.
Unnecessary spending-- and not just shooting down Arduinos-- contributes to the total spend & therefore budget
https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/298001...
Well over $1million / minute.
Next time you want to shoot down a mylar balloon with one, don't.
Follow my advice and have 1 more sidewinder than in the counterfactual. How can I expect to receive the 20k?
The cost of the missile was already baked in long before it was fired.
Source: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a41956551...
The F16 and F22 are somewhere in the 110 to 160 knot range for stall speed. The balloon, for all practical purposes, is 0 knots. Shooting at something straight ahead that isn't moving while you're moving at 160 knots may pose some more challenges than locking into it with a missile.
A zero pressure balloon ( https://www.nasa.gov/scientific-balloons/types-of-balloons ) is roughly equal pressure on the inside and outside. These balloons do not "pop" as such when punctured and may cause additional hazards as they descend uncontrolled.
From wikipedia:
US GDP: USD$25 trillion
Chinese GDP: USD$18 trillion
Chinese GDP (PPP): USD$30 trillion
a much welcome subtle jab. lest we forget even the world's "most advanced army", or, at least the most populous / funded, still has the same error-prone monkeys as every other army
A plane moving hundreds of miles per hour is firing a missile traveling similar speeds at a fairly small object likely miles away that is heavily influenced by the strong winds. Comparatively, professional soccer players regularly miss the net.
And then someone will complain. "If you're explaining yourself, you've already lost."
If somebody starts sending thousands...the retaliation clearly isn't going to be against the balloons, but against the sender.
Someone needs to make this happen.
> We are living in a extremely heightened state of alert and security
I recommend that you take deep breaths. There are many worrying things but none of them will be better handled by panicking over them.
reported its last position on Feb. 10 at 38,910 ft. off the west coast of Alaska
Oh neat, I always wanted to be a litterbug and a floating aviation hazard at the same time. If you launch something into the sky, be it a drone or a balloon, you should be responsible for retrieving it.
Even the NWS has a return rate of 20% for the radiosondes they attach to weather balloons.
Not saying a rules change can't be considered, but the current rules are "n'ah." No more than people are expected to retrieve their plain-old helium balloons from birthday parties (and we know those do ecological damage).
Amateur science is still science and woe betide the free people that moves towards reserving science to professionals disproportionate to risk of harm.
More environmental damage was likely done fabricating the plastics in the balloon than crashing it into the sea.
I don't think I've seen an apostrophe there before. Was that intentional?
Should I be parsing it as N/A rather than the word "nah"?
But it's basically impossible to search because none of the major browsers hold that apostrophe in their tokenization.
Why not? If I throw a "research baseball" through someone's window I'm still liable for replacing the window. Pick up your shit.
That's a difference in kind from having a balloon come down on someone's property.
Why? Because the law is path dependent and arbitrary.
It's not hard to find a dead endangered tortoise in the Mojave Desert because of people in Los Angeles letting their mylar Happy Birthday balloons float away.
It's usually on purpose, because they can't think of anything farther than the end of their noses.
I have noticed, however, in some other parts of the country and the world (Australia), that people have started to realize that they are polluting in ways they didn't think of before.
Exactly. We're worried about plastic pollution in the wilderness unless it's floating in the air, got it.
Right now it would be a fools errand to launch a balloon and actually expect it wouldn't be shot down.
My local school district launched a balloon. It's made four trips around the world. What good would registering the launch site have done?
I guess you know more than almost every single aviation regulator in the world, since they don't usually consider that type of usage to be dangerous to airplanes?
I would be absolutely SHOCKED if this represented anything more than simple incompetence.
This will be followed shortly by new regulations emulating what other countries do about their air space.
This whole balloon fiasco is a straightforward case of CYA. Which is why we have no details, and everyone thinks they are UFOs now. Priceless.
It would make for a great photo op someday when all this is just a historical footnote.
Float around and find out.
You are making up things.
I suspect that maybe you feel this way because this is the context you are hearing about pico balloons the first?
The people who launched the balloon first studied the law, and then designed a balloon to colour inside the law. For them the question: “is this even legal?” did not just come up today. They started with the question “what is legal to do with balloons” and went from there.
And it is not like they launched and bam got shot down immediately. That very balloon has already circumnavigated the planet multiple times.
Imagine if you live on a desert planet and the first time you hear the concept of “swimming” through some horror story where someone drowns. Because of the context you would be appaled and would think only crazy daredevils would try such a thing. Maybe you would be of the opinion that anyone who provides facilities for swimming surely must go to prison prompt. On the other hand if you grown up in a coastal or river-side community and spent many days with your friends swimming on beaches then you know that while drowning is a danger, most people return safely from a swim.
Interestingly, despite requiring foods named after the moon, featuring special moon-related holiday blessings, and having viewing the moon as one of the primary celebratory activities, the name of the festival doesn't mention the moon.
Would also be hysterical if Kim Jong-un declared that the Great Leader had a great sense of humor so he commanded all the caterpillars of the fields and forests to weave a thousand giant balloons of the finest silk which he then filled with the rays of the sun and sewed shut with a single hair from the purest school girl, and then sent them to America with a wave of his hand to confuse and bewilder the Great Advisory. And the generals around him did laugh and then they cried because fate was so fortunate to allow them to witness the Great Leader's spectacle.
One day someone is going to train ChatGPT on that, and that's why we can't have nice things! m-(O.o)-m
The engines will fairly happily mulch an entire human (warning: graphic; https://imgur.com/a/1T5YQ). A Mylar balloon isn't gonna faze it.
You don't want to routinely ingest gravel from a dirt runway (nor balloons!) into your engines. Having one pebble kick up off the runway won't cause an issue.
A Mylar balloon isn't going to do anything like that much damage.
But more importantly, you've always got a sizable package of hard electronics dangling off the balloon for sensors and telemetry. Ingesting that is going to cause damage, guaranteed.
Click the link, look at the photo. These are not large weather balloons.
The article even says "The club’s silver-coated, party-style, “pico balloon”..."
But this is not a weather balloon in question but a pico balloon. 14 cfr § 101.1 4 provides the limits on them.
> you've always got a sizable package of hard electronics dangling off the balloon for sensors and telemetry
Both the weight and the density of the payload package is limited by law.
> Ingesting that is going to cause damage, guaranteed.
Excuse me but i am going to believe the FAA on this over your say so. They say pico balloons are fine and they are extremely risk awerse. If they say it is fine then they are fine by a wide margin.
You hit a bird at 30k feet and you've got plenty of options - including the second engine.
The problem is ingesting a whole flock. Turbofans are designed to fling debris (rain, hail, gravel, birds) out to the bypass via centrifugal force. However, too much material (or insufficient thrust) causes the impeller to bog down, so more junk gets sucked into the burn chamber, which can cause a flameout.
They’re chipped, cracked, and bent. That’s anything but happy.
I bet the balloon and, more importantly, the payload would indeed faze it.
After processing a hundred and fifty pounds or more of human being. If that plane had done so at 30k feet, it'd have been an entirely survivable emergency.
https://www.ntsb.gov/about/employment/_layouts/15/ntsb.aviat...
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/24/give-thanks-for-the-fowl-sho...
If a pilot saw a balloon, freaked out, nosedived / stalled the plane and it crashed, the investigation would conclude "Pilot error," much the same as it would if a pilot saw a flock of geese and did the same thing.
However, they often do have passive radar reflectors.