Posted on 02/05/2023 8:43:07 AM PST by C210N
UNITED STATES - After the United States Air Force carried out the operation to shoot down the Chinese surveillance balloon, efforts underway to study and scrutinize both the balloon and its payload.
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The statement added, "The balloon fell approximately six miles off the coast in about 47 feet of water. No one was hurt".
(Excerpt) Read more at ssj.news ...
Dang!
She Blowed Up. REAL GOOD!
Water depth is a mere 47 feet. Payload should be covered all over by frogmen right now and Navy should inquire pipeline companies if they have a commercial submarine.(this is a small 3-man sub used for underwater pipeline inspection) The Houston based, former Halliburton company had one in 1970 that was loaned to ARAMCO in Saudi Arabia to inspect pipelines in Persian Gulf. I’m getting nostalgic now.
It’s prone to drop bad guacamole.
Our national security is safely wrapped in mislaid confidential documents.
We shot it down after receiving approval from Xi.
yea lets study a balloon that was in our air space for a week gathering info for the CCP
Nobody said they had to work in order to gain knowledge about them. Also, they won’t be in the water that long. Our ships were positioned to grab the junk.
FYI: The warhead on the US Sidewinder missile did NOT detonate when it impacted the Chinese War Balloon. It could be because the target was too soft to cause the missile’s impact fuse to work, and maybe its proximity fuse could not “see” the thin floating balloon enough, that it was unable to reflect enough of a signal to “read” its proximity. But more likely? I believe the US Air Force removed the explosive warhead from the missile, so they were basically firing a supersonic dart at the balloon, so as to take no chances of damaging the technological apparatus it was carrying!
Yes, quite true.
But there are a lot of people whose hobby is to watch airfields and such, and takeoffs without showing up on ADS-B are likely to be noticed and commented upon, especially in the context of a national news story. As are are diversions of other traffic around a spot where they’re doing something- see a bunch of commercial or general aviation traffic avoiding a certain spot, or just see an empty area of airspace that normally isn’t, and you know *something* is up.
For something like this (a shoot-down) with falling debris, you can probably count on a temporary closure of airspace or a NOTAM. There’s probably going to be some indication that something abnormal is going on.
That said, you are correct- if they chose to do it in the middle of the night (less commercial aviation and very little general aviation) in the middle of nowhere, they might be able to get it by unnoticed as something like a “routine training exercise.”
You’ve actually got me wondering- would a better way to cover up a covert shootdown be to just do it in the middle of the night and leave the intercepting aircrafts’ transponders on, while accomplishing the deed with as little deviation from a normal flight profile (and little or no airspace closure) as possible..?
(If some civilian notices: “Why yes, we did have an exercise at 0200 last night. I can’t give you the details, but it was routine in nature and all affected parties were notified in advance. Please forward any other questions to Lt. So-and-So of our public relations department...)
Milley is an ASSet of China.
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