Posted on 02/05/2023 8:06:44 AM PST by ChicagoConservative27
I bet rat faced Susan Rice came up with this whopper. She’s an expert at lying on Sunday news shows.
The shootdown should have been just before/as it entered US airspace, not after it gathered its data.
“A defense official on Saturday said…blah blah.”
This is how it starts - some flunkie journalist quotes an unnamed source and soon all the ‘Rats are repeating it as gospel fact.
A lie can have travelled halfway around the world before the truth can even get its pants on.
A lá the opening scene of Star Wars, Episode IV, A New Hope?
Booker is counting on a complicit media to help him spread the anonymous defense official’s claim this happened three times under Trump but somehow was never reported until now.
Sock puppets and propaganda are so tiresome yet continue to be effective. Where’s the hard evidence this happened before? Where’s there an Biden official on record this happened? Instead it’s an anonymous source in a press piece that is being used as cover.
If this really happened don’t you think the Trump haters in his administration would have leaked it to the media? This is how I know it is a lie to giver cover to incompetent Biden.
Bkmk
AIM-9s don’t carry a lot of explosive. They’re proximity weapons, designed to create a debris field near an airborne target. Not sure what kind of heat signature the balloon had, or if they used a TV guided missile, but I wouldn’t have expected much of an explosion. It’s the target’s fuel that explodes in air-to-air contacts.
As large as that balloon appeared from the ground, I don’t think an airplane could have captured it in any conceivable way.
“We should remember that this is now known to have happened under the Trump administration multiple times.”
Source?
“They’ve been saying that, but where’s the evidence?”
Ahhh yes. T-Bone. The vicious spawn of Corn Pop.
Makes sense too. A well known “drug lord” to just be hanging out on the streets threatening anyone who walks by and says hello. I hope Big Bad Booker got his chain and met T-Bone down by the ‘ol swimming hole.
Donald Trump provides mountains of evidence to support his claims, and the media constantly claims he says stuff “without evidence”.
The same media repeats Democrat lies without ever asking for evidence. Whenever they’re caught in a major whopper, the media just tells us to focus on their motives which are always as pure as the driven snow. They just failed at “messaging”, that’s all.
For the leftists in the media, a Democrat lie is just a failure to communicate effectively (i.e. get away with lying).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_C-130_Hercules?wprov=sfti1
The aircraft was the JC-130. There is a photo of it in the process of catching a satellite film canister (probably simulated) in-flight about halfway down in the C-130 article linked above. It was a temporary conversion according to the article, so resurrecting it from mothballs was a no go.
I seem to recall that the mystery ballon was at about 60k feet when first reported. Not many details reported on the shoot down (Altitude, weapon used, aircraft, etc.). The only details I’ve seen about the shootdown is that the fighter was out of Langley and that the debris field covered 7 square miles. (The latter detail being used by the Dems to justify not shooting it down over land.).
Other Freepers have posted about the difficulty of getting a lock on the ballon itself. That seems reasonable. File photos of inflated instrument ballons show them to be huge in size. Early reports said the instrument package on the Chinese ballon was about the size (in volume) of a school bus.
Since both are well chilled by their long time aloft, there probably wasn’t much for an IR sensor to lock on to. Might have had to use a laser guided missile and separately illuminate/designate the target. Even then, it might have been necessary to light up the payload (despite wanting to recover it) in order for the missile’s seeker to “see” the target.
Well, a lightweight instrument package hitting the water at terminal velocity from altitude wasn’t going to stay intact anyway. Probably helps explain the reported size of the debris field.
</ my two cents>
Update to my previous post:
A lot of detailed information about the aircraft, weapon, mission execution in the video. Also excellent information on the Chinese balloon, images of the payload, etc.
Armchair quarterbacks like to speculate about all sorts of aspects, and I’m no different. I suspect the selection of the F-22 as the “kill” vehicle limited the ability to actually hit the balloon in a way that would potentially enable better retrieval of the balloon’s payload.
I believe they could have poked some holes in the balloon with cannon fire, and potentially caused a more gradual descent, but by the time the downing order was able to be acted upon, the pentagon already made choices that limited that chance.
The F-22 has all this fancy dancy equipment, but only 400 or so rounds in the gatling gun. The pilot was either not very confident in their marksmanship (flight hours are expensive, the F-22 is not meant to have enemies get within cannon range, and shooting upward at maybe 60k feet isn’t as easy as you think), or the aiming system is too sophisticated to allow accurate firing on a balloon, which has a much different heat signature than a jet engine.
With the world now watching, having a F-22 shooting and missing a balloon for twenty minutes, possibly needing to send up backups as the first bird ran out of ammo, and then not even guaranteeing a good descent and recovery, it was politically expedient to just make the whole thing go boom.
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