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Chinese spy balloon floating over US

So the Fighting Cocks are back!
Check out the pilot patches. No way that's not our Gamecock. I guess they are displaying it in flight on the attack (90 degree turn).
Have to wonder if those guys in Honolulu know that's our bird on their insignias?

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"Onlookers cheered as the pilots, identified as "FRANK01" and "FRANK02," circled China's spy balloon near Myrtle Beach as it floated over the Atlantic Ocean, waiting until the object was safely away from civilians on the ground to avoid the risk of falling debris.

Pilots use callsigns in place of their names when communicating, both for security and identification purposes. The "FRANK" callsigns appear to be a reference to a WWI pilot, Frank Luke, the first airman to receive the Medal of Honor after shooting down over a dozen aircraft, including 10 spy balloons, in just eight days during World War I.

"The military jets using the call sign "FRANK" is significant," Marcus Weisgerber, global business editor for the global security news outlet Defense One, tweeted after the callsigns were identified by an airspace monitoring account. "Frank Luke Jr. was an American fighter ace in World War I better known as the 'Arizona Balloon Buster.' He is credited with shooting down 14 German surveillance balloons."

Sa-lute!!
 
The Zeppelin scene from Howard Hughes' 1930 blockbuster film Hell's Angels that was referenced in the more recent movie The Aviator about Hughes.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTAuT6ZMZXM

I picked up the DVD for this movie in a grocery store DVD stand some years ago.

The reluctant German bombardier was a German exchange student in London before WW1 and his two friends joined the RAF.

Some of the movie is black and white, while other parts like the Zeppelin scene are color-tinted. I can't remember, but I believe a very small part is actually in color.

The non-flying scenes are very campy and overacted, but the flying scenes are pretty good, even by today's standards.
 

The Raptor from the 149 Fighter Squadron, based at Langley Air Force Base, used a single AIM-9X Sidewinder, fired from 58,000 feet in the air, to shoot down the balloon that was operating at 62,000 feet, a senior military official told reporters on Saturday afternoon.

The remains of the surveillance balloon, about the size of three school buses, is spread over a seven-mile debris field in shallow water in the Atlantic, a senior military official told reporters.

That balloon had to be pretty dang big. It looked like it was only at about 10,000 feet from the ground.
 
I see a lot of people on social media complaining about allowing china to export data which is silly. the growlers out of Whidby were jamming the comms as soon as it entered our airspace until it was blown apart.
 
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I see a lot of people on social media complaining about allowing china to export data which is silly. the growlers out of Whidby were jamming the comms as soon as it entered our airspace until it was blown apart.
Only American politics and news can make a balloon famous...
 
China has satellites trained on our country 24/7, as we do them. Millions of Americans have Tik-Tok loaded on their phones.
The balloon was nothing but a distraction.
Agreed this whole thing was blown out of proportion. Would be interesting to see what kind of surveillance tech they had on this balloon that is not possible with satellites. Not sure that will be made public anytime soon.

And also what would China do if we had balloons like this floating over their country. Probably the same thing.
 
Agreed this whole thing was blown out of proportion. Would be interesting to see what kind of surveillance tech they had on this balloon that is not possible with satellites. Not sure that will be made public anytime soon.

And also what would China do if we had balloons like this floating over their country. Probably the same thing.
They would shoot them down and it wouldn't take a week while the balloon traveled thousands of miles.
 

"Onlookers cheered as the pilots, identified as "FRANK01" and "FRANK02," circled China's spy balloon near Myrtle Beach as it floated over the Atlantic Ocean, waiting until the object was safely away from civilians on the ground to avoid the risk of falling debris.
This made the local news. Luke AFB is in Phoenix area.
 
Well, you know what they say: One man's spy balloon is another man's UFO.

Or it could really just be a weather balloon that was sucked off course by the recent arctic blast. LOL

Which is why I will be following tonight's MBB game with Mizzou instead of something else as I have done since 2014.
 
Here's another view of the shootdown from the ground with no zoom.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeZSz2R106E

The speed of sound is 1086.9 ft/sec at 0* Celsius or 32* Fahrenheit.


The speed of sound in fps at sea level is 1100 feet per second, and the speed of sound in air fps is 1125 feet per second. Also, the speed of sound varies with the elevation, such as the speed of sound in fps at 2000 ft is 1089.23 feet per second, and the speed of sound in fps at 5000 ft is 1016.13. It is because the higher altitude has a lower air temperature and therefore slower speed of sound.

Going with the very cold temperature this past Saturday, this formula works out to:

60,000 ft x (1 sec/1087 ft) = 55.2 sec for the time it would take the sound of the Sidewinder detonation to reach the ground after impact.

I count about 6 seconds after the Sidewinder engine shuts off normally and you hear the bang on the ground. That would seem to indicate an actual altitude of 6-10,000 feet. A few people commented on this on some of the videos but I never worked it out until now. I would think about 1,000 ft/sec would be correct for the environmental conditions on Saturday.

As a point of reference, the speed of sound in liquid water at 46* F is a lot faster at 4,271 ft/sec.


The normal cruising altitude for a jetliner, which is much larger than an F-22, is 20,000 feet. That's where you see contrails a good bit of the time.

Realistically, neither the balloon or the F-22 would really be visible to the naked eye on the ground even on a clear day like Saturday. You would need a high-powered zoom lens like NASA used for the shuttle launches to see something that high up.

Somebody's not really telling the truth here.
 
Looks like we bagged another one.


Coincidentally, my Verizon service quit working yesterday, too. LOL

Not sure I would want to be in the Goodyear blimp for Daytona or the Super Bowl right now, either.
 
So the administration is saying we shot this thing down because at 40k feet it was posing a "potential threat to civilian aircraft" my follow up question would be would we have NOT shot it down if it was at 60k feet like the spy balloon?
 
So the administration is saying we shot this thing down because at 40k feet it was posing a "potential threat to civilian aircraft" my follow up question would be would we have NOT shot it down if it was at 60k feet like the spy balloon?
Busted.....
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