Red balloon over Montana

[PHXPhlyer]

Cool!
Came across this just after I posted the previous one.

Fighter jets that shot down Chinese balloon have ties to Arizona history

https://www.azfamily.com/2023/02/05/fig ... a-history/

PHOENIX (3TV/CBS 5) — The two fighter jets that shot down the Chinese balloon on Saturday afternoon not far from Myrtle Beach has some ties to Arizona history, believe it or not!

The two had the call sign “Frank01″ and “Frank02,” intended to honor Phoenix-born 2nd Lieutenant Frank Luke, a World War I pilot who shot down multiple German spy balloons and airplanes during the war. Call signs are used on military aircraft for both communication identity reasons and security.

Luke soon became known as the “Arizona Balloon Buster,” and the Air Force History and Museums site refers to him as “the most spectacular air fighter of World War I.” He trained in the Signal Corps’ Aviation Section in January 1918, trained further in Issoudun, France, and shot his first plane down on Aug. 16, 1918. During his career, Lt. Luke earned 2 Distinguished Service crosses.

He was killed at age 21 while on a mission behind enemy lines during an unauthorized balloon-hunting mission. Posthumously, Luke was awarded a Medal of Honor. The inscription given to the Medal reads as follows:

Severely wounded, Lieutenant Luke descended to within 50 meters of the ground and, flying at this low altitude near the town of Murvaux, opened fire upon enemy troops, killing six and wounding as many more. Forced to make a landing and surrounded on all sides by the enemy, who called upon him to surrender, he drew his automatic pistol and defended himself gallantly until he fell dead from a wound in the chest.

Air Force History & Museums
In fact, Luke Airforce Base is also named for him, and at the Arizona State Capitol, a statue was erected of him on Armistice Day in 1930.

President Joe Biden issued the order but had wanted the balloon downed even earlier, on Wednesday. He was advised that the best time for the operation would be when it was over water, U.S. officials said. Military officials determined that bringing it down over land from an altitude of 60,000 feet would pose an undue risk to people on the ground.

China responded that it reserved the right to “take further actions” and criticized the U.S. for “an obvious overreaction and a serious violation of international practice.”

PP

[boing]

I may be wrong but it does not look to me as though the missile actually detonated. Either the response was not enough to activate the warhead or perhaps the US did not want to spread the evidence all over the Atlantic.

.

[TheGreenAnger]

Balloon Shoot-Down Reveals New Insights On U.S., Chinese Capabilities

More than two years before a U.S. Air Force F-22 shot down a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4, Zheng Zhenfeng, an employee for Taiwan’s weather service, photographed a similar object floating high above Taipei, Taiwan, on Sept. 26, 2021.

Zheng’s boss, Zheng Mingdian, is certain the two events are connected, revealing a perhaps yearslong, high-altitude spying campaign by the People’s Liberation Army across the world using a new form of lighter-than-air technology.


“The high-altitude spying balloons in the news have been around a long time, and [my] weather-agency colleagues took [pictures of] them two years ago,” Zheng Mingdian, executive director of Taiwan’s weather service, wrote on Facebook on Feb. 4. “Before that, there were photo records elsewhere, too, for many years.”

The bizarre five-day, 2,000-mi. journey across the U.S. of China’s apparent spy balloon revealed three important new insights: A Raytheon AIM-9X Sidewinder-armed F-22 can shoot down a floating object above 60,000 ft., U.S. officials believe Beijing has waged a yearslong aerial spying campaign with high-altitude balloons, and some experts think the Chinese vessel reveals a potential breakthrough of ultra-long-endurance, lighter-than-air technology.

The Lockheed Martin stealth fighter’s capability to down a high-altitude balloon had never been tested or possibly even conceived, but the brazen violation of U.S. airspace prompted President Joe Biden on Feb. 1 to order a shoot-down attempt, White House officials say. Some criticized the decision to allow the balloon to cross the U.S. landmass, but military officials insisted the balloon’s surveillance capabilities posed no threat to national security. Military analysts also gained ample time to study the alleged spycraft’s behavior and emissions, while the fighter-pilot community ran simulations to determine the best way to attack the unfamiliar target.

“I don’t know that they’ve tested [the] AIM-9 at that altitude,” says Gen. Glen VanHerck, the head of North American Aerospace Defense Command. “I’m not aware of any engagements against a high-altitude balloon such as this.”

The F-22 from the 27th Fighter Sqdn. did not act alone on Feb. 4. Another F-22 flew armed and ready as backup in case the first shot missed. A high-altitude balloon—even a 200-ft.-tall balloon—presents a challenging target for a heat-seeking missile, with a dim thermal signature and a helium gas void within the envelope. The F-22 appeared to aim instead for a 70-100-ft.-long (20-30-m) horizontal truss dangling from a single line beneath the balloon—VanHerck compared its length to an Embraer ERJ 135 or ERJ 145. Ground-based civilian photography revealed that the structure carried 16 solar panel arrays and three inboard stations or pods.

The heat generated by the electronic systems appeared to be enough to provide a targeting lock for the imaging infrared seeker in the AIM-9X. The height of the target—60,000-65,000 ft.—still required the missile to ascend several thousand feet from a launch point at 58,000 ft., a senior defense official says. The result was a perhaps unlikely first air-to-air kill against a balloon by the U.S. Air Force’s premier fighter.

“I’m really incredibly proud of everybody that took part in this, but the F-22 was remarkable,” VanHerck says.

Two U.S. Navy ships—the amphibious landing ship USS Carter Hall and the survey ship USNS Pathfinder—are mapping and collecting pieces of the debris from the balloon that now lie scattered over an approximately 1 mi. X 1-mi. box about 50 ft. below the surface roughly 6 mi. off the South Carolina coast.

In the age of hourly satellite overflights and relentless cyberattacks, an inflated surveillance system slowly drifting over Alaska, Canada and the continental U.S. appeared at first to stand as an unusual—inexplicable, even—one-off event. But the story quickly grew as reports emerged of similar balloon sightings around the world, including an ongoing balloon flight over South America, previous incidents in East Asia that had gone unexplained and a newly discovered trial of previous balloon flights over U.S. territory, including Guam, Hawaii, Texas and Florida. Instead of a singular provocation, a pattern has developed of Chinese spy flights by slow-moving high-altitude balloons, which had gone apparently undetected by U.S. surveillance systems.

“I will tell you that we did not detect those threats, and that’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out,” VanHerck says.

Although the previous overflights above U.S. soil had been missed, the intelligence community kept track of China’s spying balloon campaign in other parts of the world. Congress was briefed about the program in August, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre says.

“There has been a program that has been in effect,” Jean-Pierre adds. “We have kept Congress abreast on that. But I don’t have anything more to say or to share.”

In fact, the evidence for such a spy effort has been available in the public domain for several years, but the shock of the U.S. overflight helped bring it back into focus. In addition to high-altitude balloon sightings over Taiwan in September 2021 and March 2022, Japanese government officials reopened reviews of similar publicly reported overflights of Japan in June 2020 and 2021.

When a similarly spherical white balloon flew near Miyagi prefecture in northeast Japan in 2020, photos of the object showed a perhaps earlier version of the technology that entered the U.S. on Jan. 31. In that case, the dangling support truss supported 24 solar panel arrays, payloads and a crosswise boom. The latter appeared to include a set of outboard-mounted propellers. It was not clear if the propulsive devices were being used to steer the balloon or the structure housing the payload.

By contrast, images of the latest balloon captured by photographers on the ground with telephoto zoom lenses appear to show a major evolution in the design of the payload module, including one-third fewer solar panels, three inboard payload modules and no clear evidence of any propellers.

Such long-distance visual evidence contrasted with remarks by John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman. “It had propellers,” Kirby says. “It had a rudder, if you will, to allow it to change direction.” Civilian photos provided no signs of a rudder aboard the balloon, and it is not clear how such a control surface would help steer a spherical, slow-speed object. Kirby also may have been speaking metaphorically about a rudder.

In any case, members in the high-altitude balloon community have identified potentially significant technology advances exhibited by the Chinese vessel.

The few examples of ultra-long-distance, high-altitude balloons, such as Google’s canceled Loon project, share a few common traits: a pumpkin-shaped, superpressure envelope, internal ballonet and translucent fabric.

The final item in that list is essential for regulating the temperature—and therefore pressure—inside the helium envelope. A translucent fabric allows most light to pass through the balloon without heating the helium gas inside.

But the Chinese balloon appeared to use an opaque fabric over a pumpkin-shaped helium envelope. If confirmed, China’s program may have been the first successful design to use a helium envelope covered by a fabric that reflects the Sun’s energy rather than letting it pass through, says Dan Bowen, a former balloon systems engineer at Project Loon. The result suggests a breakthrough by creating a more efficient system to regulate temperature without adding too much structural weight.

“I’m sure the rest of the world will quickly investigate this,” Bowen says in an analysis released on Stratospheric Balloon Science, his YouTube channel.

The most advanced ultra-long-endurance, high-altitude balloons seldom use propellers for directional control. Instead, such aircraft pump regular air into an internal ballonet envelope to descend or release the air to climb, Bowen says. Altitude adjustments are made to find wind currents moving in other directions. The system provides a limited capability for directional control.

U.S. researchers have worked on similar technology with the Strat-OAWL (stratospheric optical autocovariance wind lidar) device, which Ball Aerospace flew on DARPA’s Adaptable Lighter-Than-Air (ALTA) balloon in 2019. ALTA was aimed at demonstrating a high-altitude, lighter-than-air vehicle capable of windborne navigation over extended ranges and, according to DARPA, could navigate without independent propulsion by changing altitudes in excess of 75,000 ft.

A key element of ALTA was development of a Winds Aloft Sensor, which in the case of the DARPA project could send real-time stratospheric wind measurements back to the ground. The Ball Strat-OAWL system, which dates back as far as 2004 to proof-of-concept hardware efforts, is designed to measure winds from aerosol backscatter at the 355-nanometer or 532-nanometer wavelengths.

Meanwhile, the debris recovery effort also may help answer questions about the capabilities of the Chinese balloon’s alleged surveillance payload. The decision to allow the balloon to cross the U.S. before shooting it down was based on a military assessment that the onboard sensors provided no threat, Kirby says.

“The time that we had to study this balloon over the course of a few days last week we believe was important and will give us a lot more clarity not only on the capabilities that these balloons have, but what China’s trying to do with them,” he says.

https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/ ... us-chinese

[TheGreenAnger]

The sidewinder almost certainly exploded and brought the balloon down after it locked onto the horizontal truss dangling beneath the balloon carrying the solar panels etc.

The F-22s' callsign "FRANK 01/02 " was a homage to American World War One ace Lieutenant Frank Luke Jr, the "Arizona Balloon Buster." Between September 12 and September 29, Luke was credited with shooting down 14 German balloons and four airplanes.

- As previously noted in PHP's post..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luke

[TheGreenAnger]

Cool!
Came across this just after I posted the previous one.

Fighter jets that shot down Chinese balloon have ties to Arizona history

https://www.azfamily.com/2023/02/05/fig ... a-history/

PHOENIX (3TV/CBS 5) — The two fighter jets that shot down the Chinese balloon on Saturday afternoon not far from Myrtle Beach has some ties to Arizona history, believe it or not!

The two had the call sign “Frank01″ and “Frank02,” intended to honor Phoenix-born 2nd Lieutenant Frank Luke, a World War I pilot who shot down multiple German spy balloons and airplanes during the war. Call signs are used on military aircraft for both communication identity reasons and security.

Luke soon became known as the “Arizona Balloon Buster,” and the Air Force History and Museums site refers to him as “the most spectacular air fighter of World War I.” He trained in the Signal Corps’ Aviation Section in January 1918, trained further in Issoudun, France, and shot his first plane down on Aug. 16, 1918. During his career, Lt. Luke earned 2 Distinguished Service crosses.

He was killed at age 21 while on a mission behind enemy lines during an unauthorized balloon-hunting mission. Posthumously, Luke was awarded a Medal of Honor. The inscription given to the Medal reads as follows:

Severely wounded, Lieutenant Luke descended to within 50 meters of the ground and, flying at this low altitude near the town of Murvaux, opened fire upon enemy troops, killing six and wounding as many more. Forced to make a landing and surrounded on all sides by the enemy, who called upon him to surrender, he drew his automatic pistol and defended himself gallantly until he fell dead from a wound in the chest.

Air Force History & Museums
In fact, Luke Airforce Base is also named for him, and at the Arizona State Capitol, a statue was erected of him on Armistice Day in 1930.

President Joe Biden issued the order but had wanted the balloon downed even earlier, on Wednesday. He was advised that the best time for the operation would be when it was over water, U.S. officials said. Military officials determined that bringing it down over land from an altitude of 60,000 feet would pose an undue risk to people on the ground.

China responded that it reserved the right to “take further actions” and criticized the U.S. for “an obvious overreaction and a serious violation of international practice.”

PP

@PHP, your SNL video gets the Golden Balloon award for best post last week, and that's not hot air!

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

I am reading an awful lot of official horse-hoo-ey as to why it wasn't shot down immediately over the thousand miles of uninhabited Alaska and northern Canada it first passed over.
And as a former interceptor pilot and NATO Intelligence officer, I know horse-hoo-ey when I see it.

So, what's the real reason?

There's only two places it could have come from, and they are both enemies.
They clearly detected it, and could hit it, so Biden must have told them not to.

[Pinky the pilot]

I still wonder just why the Yanks did not shoot it down and say nothing!!

[G-CPTN]

I still wonder just why the Yanks did not shoot it down and say nothing!!

What balloon?

[boing]

I don't think the US knew what would happen if they tried to shoot down the balloon so some time was spent weighing the possibilities.
Possibility 1. The balloon would "pop" and the payload would immediately drop from 60,000 feet.
Possibility 2. If the damage could be limited, say by the use of gun ammunition, the balloon may descend slowly and be recovered but since nobody has ever shot a balloon of unknown design at this altitude who knows?
Possibility 3. Shoot down the balloon over a softer surface, the sea, to limit probably damage to the payload and allow some recovery possibility.

Choice of weapon was interesting. Gun ammunition would seem better because the deflation may be more slow but not many pilots have experience with sniper shots with an aircraft gun at a stationary target at 60,000 feet. Missiles could home on some part of the balloon but if possible the US wanted to salvage the sensor package intact. From the video I have seen there was apparently no missile detonation just impact damage. Did anyone see anything otherwise?

.

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

Well, the USAF have progressed from bombing wedding parties to shooting down balloons. I guess they'll be strafing the beer coolers at Spring Break beach BBQs next

[PHXPhlyer]

U.S. shoots down 'high-altitude object' over Alaskan airspace, White House says
The object was flying at 40,000 feet and "posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight," National Security Council official John Kirby said. Biden ordered the military to shoot it down.

Pilot anxiously waiting to see what "object" will be stenciled under his plane's canopy rail.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white- ... -rcna70166

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military on Friday afternoon shot down a "high-altitude object" flying over Alaskan airspace and Arctic waters, National Security Council official John Kirby confirmed at the White House.

The Pentagon had been tracking the object over the last 24 hours, he said.

"The object was flying at an altitude of 40,000 feet and posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight," Kirby told reporters during the White House briefing. "Out of an abundance of caution, and at the recommendation of the Pentagon, President Biden ordered the military to down the object and they did and it came inside our territorial waters and those waters right now are frozen."

Fighter aircraft assigned to U.S. Northern Command took down the object "within the last hour," Kirby said around 2:30 p.m. ET.

The pilots were able to determine that it was "unmanned" before it was shot down, he added.

Kirby made clear the U.S. does not know who owns the object and he would not call it a balloon, like the one allegedly owned by the Chinese government that the U.S. military shot down on Saturday.

"We're calling this an object because that's the best description we have right now," Kirby said. "We do not know who owns it, whether it's state-owned or corporate-owned or privately-owned. We just don't know."

Pilots shot the object down just off the northeastern part of Alaska, near the Canadian border, over the Arctic Sea, Kirby said.

Officials did not understand the full purpose of the object, Kirby added, saying the U.S. expects that it will be able to recover the debris. "A recovery effort will be made and we're hopeful that it'll be successful and then we can learn a little bit more about it," he said.

The object, which the U.S. learned about on Thursday evening, was described as "roughly the size of a small car," Kirby said.

Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder provided additional details at a briefing with reporters, noting that the object was shot down at 1:45 p.m. ET.

The U.S. initially detected the object on ground radar Thursday and further investigated it using aircraft, Ryder said. An F-22 fighter jet shot down the object using an A9X missile, he added.

U.S. Northern Command coordinated the operation with assistance from the Alaska Air National Guard, the Federal Aviation Administration and the FBI, Ryder said.

Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, said he was briefed by senior Pentagon officials about the object and said the U.S. needs to “reestablish deterrence” in response to the Chinese government, which he said, “believes they can willfully infiltrate American airspace whenever they want.”

“That has to stop. The best way to do this is through the type of actions that we’ve taken today in Alaska and to publicly reiterate that we will be shooting down any and all unknown aircraft that violate our airspace,” Sullivan said in a statement. “We also need to appropriately equip our military in Alaska with the sensors and aircraft needed to detect and, if necessary, destroy everything from slow-moving balloons to hypersonic missiles.”

Asked why the U.S. seemed to take more immediate action in downing the object compared with last week's response to the alleged Chinese spy balloon, Ryder said, "In this particular case, given the fact that it was operating at an altitude that posed a reasonable threat to civilian air traffic, the determination was made and the president gave the order to take it down."

Civilian aircraft, he added, usually operate around 40,000 to 45,000 feet and therefore the object presented a "threat to or a potential hazard to civilian air traffic."

The suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that was shot down last week was determined by the Pentagon to be traveling at an altitude of about 60,000 feet.

Kirby said the object in Alaska didn't appear to have the ability to independently maneuver like the Chinese balloon that flew above the U.S. for eight days before it was downed off the coast of South Carolina.

"The first one was able to maneuver, and loiter, slow down, speed up," Kirby said. "It was very purposeful."

A senior State Department official said Thursday that the balloon from last week had proven ties to the Chinese military and included “multiple antennas” capable of collecting signals intelligence.

PP

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

Number 3 just shot down over Northern Canada.
And we are supposed to believe this all started a week ago?
Or just that now it's public knowledge, they've suddenly decided to do something about it?
Wonder how many months or years this has in fact been going on?

[TheGreenAnger]

Number 3 just shot down over Northern Canada.
And we are supposed to believe this all started a week ago?
Or just that now it's public knowledge, they've suddenly decided to do something about it?
Wonder how many months or years this has in fact been going on?

+1

Since the invention of the balloon probably.

I hope no Canada geese are downed in the latest "bubble" or balloon hysteria!

[Rossian]

The thing is - the second object"the size of a small car" at 40000feet, what was powering it in level flight?? The third object "smaller than the second one and cylindrical" at 40000 feet, what was powering that one??
Are we ever likely to find out? Or am I being overly sceptical/cynical?
So many questions which are unlikely to be answered.

The Ancient Mariner

[boing]

Rossian,
You have just pointed out the elephant in the room.
A relatively tiny heavier than air machine flying for hours at 40k? Was it really heavier than air? I hope we find out cos' if it wasn't there are going to be some panics at DoD.

On the other hand if any other nation has made a technical break through in propulsion they would be pretty dumb to reveal it by using over a potential unfriendlly country.

.

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

Checkout HAPS / HALE
High Altitude Pseudo-Satellite, or High Altitude Platform System, High Altitude Long Endurance.
possibly a solar powered drone.
Lots of people working on them.

On the other hand if any other nation has made a technical break through in propulsion they would be pretty dumb to reveal it by using over a potential unfriendly country.

..unless, of course, they nicked the design from that country in the first place

[G-CPTN]

You realise that we are dealing with Aliens - and they aren't impressed with us blasting their aircraft out of the sky!

What a welcome!

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

There is a perfectly good, existing method for aliens to enter the US and be welcomed with open arms and free everything...

..just cross the Rio Grande at night in a kiddies' inflatable dinghy and, speaking Spanish, claim to be a child.

[PHXPhlyer]

Splash Four!

U.S. military has shot down an unidentified object over Lake Huron
The object went down in the lake Sunday and there were no indications of any collateral damage, a congressional source briefed on the matter and two U.S. officials told NBC News.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/nation ... -rcna70289

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military shot down an unidentified object over Lake Huron Sunday, a congressional source briefed on the matter and two U.S. officials told NBC News — the fourth in less than two weeks to be downed over North American airspace.

The officials all said there are no indications of any collateral damage and that the object went down in the lake and officials expect to recover it.

Sunday's shoot down of an object in the skies over North America is the third in as many days, and the fourth this month.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

PP

[OFSO]

A hexagonal object, size of a car, no balloon and no hint of what was keeping it up. Dozy Joe said might be of extraterrestrial origin. No sh*t!