A small, globe-trotting balloon declared \u201cmissing in action\u201d by an Illinois-based hobbyist club on Feb. 15 has emerged as a candidate to explain one of the three mystery objects shot down by four heat-seeking missiles launched by U.S. Air Force fighters since Feb. 10.
\nThe club\u2014the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB)\u2014is not pointing fingers yet.
\nBut the circumstantial evidence is at least intriguing. The club\u2019s silver-coated, party-style, \u201cpico balloon\u201d reported its last position on Feb. 10 at 38,910 ft. off the west coast of Alaska, and a popular forecasting tool\u2014the HYSPLIT model provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)\u2014projected the cylindrically shaped object would be floating high over the central part of the Yukon Territory on Feb. 11. That is the same day a Lockheed Martin F-22 shot down an unidentified object of a similar description and altitude in the same general area.
\nThere are suspicions among other prominent members of the small, pico-ballooning enthusiasts\u2019 community, which combines ham radio and high-altitude ballooning into a single, relatively affordable hobby.
\n\u201cI tried contacting our military and the FBI\u2014and just got the runaround\u2014to try to enlighten them on what a lot of these things probably are. And they\u2019re going to look not too intelligent to be shooting them down,\u201d 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.
\nThe descriptions of all three unidentified objects shot down Feb. 10-12 match the shapes, altitudes and payloads of the small pico balloons, which can usually be purchased for $12-180 each, depending on the type.
\n\u201cI\u2019m guessing probably they were pico balloons,\u201d said Tom Medlin, a retired FedEx engineer and co-host of the Amateur Radio Roundtable show. Medlin has three pico balloons in flight in the Northern and Southern hemispheres.
\nAviation Week contacted a host of government agencies, including the FBI, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the National Security Council (NSC) and the Office of the Secretary of Defense for comment about the possibility of pico balloons. The NSC did not respond to repeated requests. The FBI and OSD did not acknowledge that harmless pico balloons are being considered as possible identities for the mystery objects shot down by the Air Force.
\n\u201cI have no update for you from NORAD on these objects,\u201d a NORAD spokesman says.
\nOn Feb. 15, NSC spokesman John Kirby told reporters all three objects \u201ccould just be balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose,\u201d but he did not mention the possibility of pico balloons.
\nLaunching high-altitude, circumnavigational pico balloons has emerged only within the past decade. 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.
\nThe 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.
\nMedlin says he uses a foil balloon sold by Japanese company Yokohama for $12. The material has proven to be resilient for long periods at high altitude, he says, even if the manufacturer never intended the balloon to be used for that purpose. An alternative is Meadows\u2019 SBS, which makes a series of balloons designed specially for circumnavigational flights.
\nThe pico-ballooning community is nervous about the negative attention by some members of Congress and the White House, who have called the objects shot down at altitudes of 20,000-40,000 ft. dangerous to civil aviation.
\n\u201cWe did assess that their altitudes were considerably lower than the Chinese high-altitude balloon and did pose a threat to civilian commercial air traffic,\u201d Kirby says. \u201cAnd while we have no specific reason to suspect that they were conducting surveillance of any kind, we couldn\u2019t rule that out.\u201d
\nIn fact, the pico balloons weigh less than 6 lb. and therefore are exempt from most FAA airspace restrictions, Meadows and Medlin said. Three countries\u2014North Korea, Yemen and the UK\u001f\u2014restrict 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.
\nThe community is also nervous that their balloons could be shot down next. Medlin says one of his balloons\u2014call sign W5KUB-112\u2014is projected by HYSPLIT to enter U.S. airspace on Feb. 17. It already circumnavigated the globe several times, but its trajectory last carried the object over China before it will enter either Mexican or U.S. airspace.
\n\u201cI hope,\u201d Medlin said, \u201cthat in the next few days when that happens we\u2019re not real trigger-happy and start shooting down everything.\u201d<\/p>\n
Aviationweek<\/p>\n
Tags:Missing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A small, globe-trotting balloon declared \u201cmissing in action\u201d by an Illinois-based hobbyist club on Feb. 15 has emerged as a candidate to explain one of the three mystery objects shot down by four heat-seeking missiles launched by U.S. Air Force fighters since Feb. 10. The club\u2014the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB)\u2014is not pointing fingers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":5991,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1154],"tags":[2291,2490,1473],"class_list":["post-5990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trending","tag-balloon","tag-club","tag-missing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5990"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5992,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5990\/revisions\/5992"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}