This sounds like the kind of thing Garmin Autonomy was invented to prevent. RIP
Autoland could work if the pilot had time to pull the handle. If ATC did not receive any mayday call, it probably happened very quickly or so slowly they didn’t realize what was happening. CO poisoning maybe?
Johh, for what its worth, Garmin Autonomy can be manually activated or it senses inactivity and can auto engage.
The word I read from the F-16 pilot was “unresponsive” or was that NORAD’s comment?
Correct; may not have been pressurization at all. But if not, puzzling why the two adult passengers would not have made an attempt to intervene, even if not aviation savvy. Very sad.
And leave it to the media to overshadow this tragic loss of life with overhyping the F-16’s going supersonic–who cares? I’m just glad they responded as quickly as they did and if warp speed is warranted, use it!
“ Can’t imagine, in any event, what information the balloon could collect that satellites & an office on the 4th story of a nearby building couldn’t intercept as well.”
Agreed. Procedures and policies are in place for satellite overflights so as to lessen the available ELINT/SIGINT. So then, what was the goal? What was the most valuable data collected?
The data recorded during the live fire F-22 MISSLE-EX was more valuable than anything gathered over the Continental U.S.
I think we gave “them” exactly what “they” wanted.
We owe the CCP a debt of gratitude for showing us a weakness in our defenses we had no idea about. Better yet, it cost us nothing but a bit of embarrassment. I thought it was clever of them to hit where we ain’t lookin: balloons.
We about know every rocket that launches around the globe. The US alone launches dozens of weather balloons every day, plus amateur & scientific balloons.
Our tracking systems ignore balloons as not a threat.
The CCP declared itself a “near arctic” country a while ago (only 7k miles away). Since the ice melted, they’re pretty desperate to get in on the acrid gold rush: ores, rare earth minerals, open new shipping lanes. China is a relatively new space nation. I suspect they might not have good satellite coverage in the arctic yet. The fact that this balloon flew over the continental US might have been a fluke. But once discovered, what are their options? Jettison the load & hope we don’t find it?
I rode a Navy pressure chamber up to 30+K or so. At around 20K several persons were told to remove their masks and do some simple task. It was only seconds before they went goofy, grinned a lot, and had zero capability to understand or perform. Within a minute or two, they would have been unconscious. A loss of oxygen is an immediate and soon fatal issue unless it is very quickly recognized. When I was a controller in the USAF, we were instructed that if a fighter type began to act weird (more so than normal), we were to tell them,“go 100% oxygen, go 100% oxygen”.