F22 Vs Gas Balloon COMMENT He Who Laughs Has A Short Memory

The AIM-9 Sidewinder supersonic air-to-air cruise missile launched from an F-22 on a gas balloon looks like a scene from a steampunk game And you don't have to be a hot air balloonist to see the fall of the torn envelope of an air giant chilling you to the core.

By a special twist of fate, it was just on the eve of the start of the Jaroslav Hašek balloon race, when I learned about the shooting down in the circle of balloon pilots It goes without saying that the debate has turned in this direction as well.

The attention of literally the whole world is fixed on the device that the Chinese balloon was carrying If you are a balloonist, you might be just as interested, or even a little more interested in its packaging.

In other words, a material that can hold uncomfortably tiny helium molecules for many days and carry a huge mass at a flight level of FL600, i e.

about 20 kilometers A freezing place with such low atmospheric pressure, that ordinary weather balloons made of latex have exploded long ago (somewhere at an altitude of 15 km).

By the way, it is the flight level of 60 thousand feet that determines the vertical limit of the airspace of the United States In Europe it is FL660, or 66 thousand feet.

The height of the Chinese intruder was around 60,000 feet when, according to Time, it was examined by a u-2 aircraft capable of such access And it is not without interest that the Air Force used an F-22 Raptor aircraft to shoot it down, which has a maximum range of 65,000 feet (approx.

19,800 meters) The F-35 Lightning II can "only" climb to 55,000 feet (approx.

16,700 meters) It is also worth mentioning that the downing of the Chinese balloon is probably the first ever shot down by an F-22 aircraft and at the same time the shot down at the highest altitude in history.

We can mention here the downing of the American spy plane U-2 over the territory of the USSR on May 1, 1960 To this day, doubts remain as to whether he was shot down at 65,000 feet (19,800 m) by an S-75 Dvina (NATO code: SA-2 Guideline) surface-to-air anti-aircraft missile, or whether Pilot Powers came into the flow of a Russian Su-9 (for increasing the reach of the unarmed), which could have caused him to fall, and would also explain why Powers survived the shootdown.

An interesting detail of the American operation, which was described for journalists by the commander of the defense of the air space of the United States, General Glen D VanHerck, is also a reference to the first airman in history to receive the Medal of Honor.

"The call sign of the first flight was Frank 01 The second F-22 flight was Luke 01," VanHerck said.

Flying ace Frank Luke shot down 14 German observation balloons during World War I As VanHerck further stated, the Chinese balloon was huge.

"The estimated size of the balloon itself was up to 200 feet (60 meters, editor's note) I would categorize its cargo as the size of a small airliner.

” If we take the mentioned 200 feet in diameter, or about 60 meters, it would mean an incredible volume of about 113 thousand cubic meters In the interview, General VanHerck tried to estimate the weight of the cargo of the spy balloon at "several thousand pounds" (1 lb = approx.

0 45 Kg)

Fellow balloonists alerted me to an interesting discussion within the non-public online forum of American experimental balloon builders There was speculation here that the Chinese balloon wrapper had a compressed air balloon installed inside.

A similar system is used in airships The balloon puts pressure on the carrier gas (helium) in the package, thereby adjusting its density and thus the balloon's buoyancy.

It is thus possible to regulate its height without dropping the carrier gas And height, as you know, is the key to controlling a balloon.

With a regular sports gas balloon, we regulate the height either by throwing out the load or by releasing the carrier gas through a valve in the balloon's canopy The more we maneuver like this, the more we lose one or the other.

Here, however, this key issue of control is solved very elegantly and, above all, without losses The air can be compressed on board with a compressor powered by a solar panel, and the helium supply remains the same, or is only gradually thinned by the leakage of helium molecules through the package.

The more we delve into studying the possible design of the balloon that was shot down by the United States Air Force on Saturday, February 4, the more we can discover just how remarkable a device it must have been, and that's not even talking about what was suspended underneath The balloon's route is plotted on the above animation.

The use of so-called jet streams, also known as jet streams, became essential, for example, for the famous record-breaking balloon flights of adventurers such as Richard Brason, Per Lindstrand and Steve Fossett In January 1991, Branson and Lindstrand were able to cross the Pacific Ocean in a hot air balloon for the first time.

In 46 hours and 15 minutes, they flew a distance of 7,672 kilometers (between Japan and Canada) at a speed sometimes approaching 400 km/h In 1995, Steve Fossett was able to overcome the distance between South Korea and Canada in just four days in a balloon.

Personally, I would like to see a device that was able to get a Chinese balloon from the take-off point over several closely watched bases in the US, which are mentioned in this article for example I imagine it was very efficient at calculating and predicting wind speeds and directions at different levels and creating a flight strategy based on that.

I venture to say that for those who have been watching ballooning for a long time, is this Chinese flight, of course, leaving aside its purpose, a very interesting undertaking The fact that technology from the end of the 18th century (ie the so-called Charlière) can cause chaos when it meets current technology is also worth paying attention to.

I vividly remember how essential radar transponder equipment was in the Gordon Bennett Cup gas balloon race across Europe What general terror can a flying giant, unseen and unheard, cause in heavy air traffic.

When pilot Jan Smrčka and I experienced a transponder malfunction somewhere over Switzerland in the middle of a full moon night in September 2018 and the flight controller could not see our current altitude, we had to land immediately with the first rays of the sun And it was only thanks to Smrček's piloting virtuosity that the hard landing went well.

A few years later, Americans are now debating whether how many similar balloons have violated their airspace and whether it was under this or that president They are rapidly developing tracking systems to find out what Chinese balloons may have seen in the past, where they may have flown.

Even this giant Chinese balloon, as Time points out, "became national news on February 2 after civilian pilots became concerned about its presence and the Pentagon admitted that the alleged spy balloon was inside the country " The involvement of balloons in military operations is seen with with a slight smile.

For example, the first ever bombing (from a "balloon ship" in addition) in history, when the famous Marshal Radecký, a native of the village of Třebnice near Sedlčany, bombed Venice from balloons in the summer of 1849 Guiding artillery fire from a balloon during the First World War or a balloon barrage over London in the Second World War are all considered part of history.

Likewise, the fear of espionage during the flight of the Graf Zeppelin airship over the Czech armory in the summer of 1930 In contemporary texts about the Chinese balloon, here and there there is a mention of the Japanese attempts to get incendiary balloons into the territory of the United States during the Second World War.

With a bit of imagination, we could imagine that this is where the Chinese inspiration may come from Some sources state that it was this effort by the Japanese to respond to Doolittle's raid on Tokyo on April 18, 1942, that led to the discovery of the aforementioned jet streams in the Earth's atmosphere.

Japan released perhaps thousands, although about 285 reached US soil, according to the National Museum of the United States Air Force Most ended up in the US Northwest, but one case was recorded as far away as Michigan.

Even though the explosives on the balloons, glued together from handmade paper by thousands of Japanese schoolgirls, they had no major effect, yet they accounted for the only American civilian casualties of World War II on United States soil and can be considered the first ever transcontinental weapon It's tricky with balloons, the more you watch them, the stronger you get the feeling that history keeps repeating itself.

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