One of the oddest aspects of the "Chinese spy balloons over America" saga is this:
The top military commander overseeing North American airspace said Monday that some previous incursions by Chinese spy balloons during the Trump administration were not detected in real time, and the Pentagon learned of them only later.
“I will tell you that we did not detect those threats, and that’s a domain awareness gap,” said Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, the commander of the Pentagon’s Northern Command.
One explanation, multiple U.S. officials said, is that some previous incursions were initially classified as “unidentified aerial phenomena,” Pentagon speak for U.F.O.s. As the Pentagon and intelligence agencies stepped up efforts over the past two years to find explanations for many of those incidents, officials reclassified some events as Chinese spy balloons.
I mean, I would have thought that something as big as that balloon and its payload, moving with the wind, would make for a big radar target that would be readily identified (as a balloon at least, if not the country of origin.)
But I would remind my feeble number of readers that there are some remarkable oddities about US airspace awareness where they can't identify a big aircraft even when they are visually identified by other pilots. I think I have posted about this incident before: a 2017 case where airliners saw another aircraft flying high over Oregon, it had no transponder turned on, and despite some F 15s being scrambled, it seems no one knows where it ended up. (You can read even more detail about it in this follow up post. I mean, it seems it was not a small aircraft, but was something like airliner size. How can they lose track of that over the West coast? Of course, if it really was a UFO, that could explain it! But it apparently looked like a large, white aircraft, and was flying fast, but at airliner type speed.)
So, it would seem US identification of what's going on in its airspace is not as foolproof as you would expect.
Radar will not pick up the balloon. In WW2 the Germans had trouble with the Mosquito fighter bomber because it was made mostly of wood. The radar might detect the metal structures underneath but that depends on the altitude and it would be a low return. Even if it was detected it might dismissed as noise. It is also possible the structures were designed to minimize a radar return. If it is very high I doubt commercial radars(airports) search that high.
ReplyDeleteI'm guessing. I am not surprised that radar did not detect the balloon.
I'm guessing too, but the payload was reported as pretty substantial, and it looked big on the photos. Didn't look radar stealthy to my inexpert eye.
ReplyDeleteYou're right, it was a huge hunk of metal. NORAD did detect but decided to just observe but did send up a spy plane. Probably trying to understand what it was transmitting as a means of gathering intel on Chinese communication networks. Reverse spying?
ReplyDeletehttps://www.foxnews.com/us/norad-detected-chinese-spy-flight-before-reached-us-could-not-take-action-general-says