US Air Force: Discussion and News

Russia could lend a helping hand. Or in this case a helping MiG-31.

The Chinese claim it is not theirs...

Ironically it was Japan that started launching balloons like that during WWII, but during the Cold war the west sent lots of balloons over the Soviet Union to spy... funny to see them getting a taste of their own medicine...

First pic of the failed shot down attempt.

Question for our space experts : At what height does " space " actually start ? For the purposes of it being in international area legally ? After all satellites are not shot down , even if gathering intelligence , because they are in space ? Can balloon be high enough to say , it was in space ? Also , I doubt this Balloon was innocent weather thing . Because the yanks shot it down over Sea . So they can say " we don't know what it was . " But if shot over land ,then no excuse , must say it was spy Balloon and risk souring relations . Therefore the yanks want to back down and not escalate , whatever they were escalating !

Can someone explain to me about this Chinese Spy Balloon that the US shot down? What is going on? Do it belong to China and why would China do something like this?


https://www.yahoo.com/gma/us-tracking-large-chinese-spy-221300297.html

So the various SAM systems like Patriot that NATO is sending to Ukraine are not even good enough to shoot down a balloon over water. A fighter jet had to be send to do the job.

Can someone explain to me about this Chinese Spy Balloon that the US shot down? What is going on? Do it belong to China and why would China do something like this?

They claim it is a weather balloon... they might be taking the piss or it might be genuine... the US is treating it as a spy platform which is no real surprise because most of their weather balloons were spy platforms...

Not really on topic on this thread however.

So the various SAM systems like Patriot that NATO is sending to Ukraine are not even good enough to shoot down a balloon over water. A fighter jet had to be send to do the job.

To be fair balloons are normally rather tricky targets, the soviets developed a special range of specialist platforms designed to shoot them down.

For the Us space begins at 80km, for most of the world 100km (Kármán-line).

But as one Twitter user pointed out, there is a an article in that treaty for balloons. If they are above 80.000ft
they are like satellites (from a legal point of view). Who wanted this article?   The US. 

Other question: was the balloon still in american airspace or over international waters?

GarryB wrote:To be fair balloons are normally rather tricky targets, the soviets developed a special range of specialist platforms designed to shoot them down.

You can shift this discussion to the appropriate thread. What weapons did the USSR use to neutralize such "spy balloons"?

Americans managed to send a F-22 that cost $85,325 an hour to fly and fired a $350K AIM-9X to bring down a $1000 balloon.

Not even close to the worlds best air defence though....

So despite the posts are about a Chinese balloon shot down after flying over US territory this thread is about Soviet anti balloon technology of the cold war.

Balloons drift very slowly and are difficult targets to detect and track for radar, which is why the US and the west used them to send spy platforms across the Soviet Union before they could use satellites.

The Japanese also sent balloons to cross the Pacific Ocean to attack the US by starting forest fires... this would not normally be very practical except that the coast of the US is enormous so launching enormous numbers of balloons should result in some hits and cause problems.

The main problems of interception is a high closing speed with a fighter aircraft and a drifting balloon, many Soviet attempted solutions included aircraft with 23mm cannon using very special 23mm cannon shells that had very very sensitive nose fuses.

The problem was normal shells would pass through the balloon without exploding and make tiny puncture holes that would take days to effect the balloons height.

The new shells exploded on impact with the balloons skin but were so sensitive they could explode if fired in the rain.

Low altitude balloons were used as well of course...

Versions of the An-2 and various fighter aircraft and the aircraft that eventually became the M-17 were fitted with dorsal mounted cannon and optimised to fly at altitude for the job of shooting down balloons.

It was a dead end technology however as satellites replaced them for intel gathering.