A military surveillance blimp came untethered from its home base in Maryland around noon today. He said it is in two “mostly intact” pieces, with the main body and the tail section a few hundred meters apart.
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Tiffany Slusser Hartkorn lost power when the tether knocked out a power pole and tree branch on Bloomsburg’s outskirts. The second blimp will be grounded until the military inspects it and finishes an investigation into the unmooring, said Navy Captain Scott Miller, a spokesman for the USA military’s North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD. The aerostat moored at Edgewood broke free at around 11:54 a.m.; approximately 6,700 feet of tether are attached. He says there was never any intention of shooting down the blimp. The 240-foot helium-filled unmanned Army surveillance blimp broke loose from its mooring in Maryland.
Pennsylvania State Police troopers are using shotguns to deflate a wayward surveillance blimp that broke loose from a Maryland facility before coming down into trees in the Pennsylvania countryside.
The blimps can go as high as 10,000 feet and remain in place for as long as 30 days via a tether that provides it with power and transmits the radar data to ground systems. The cables dangling from the blimp took out power lines in Pennsylvania, resulting in massive power outages across the the eastern part of the state, affecting Lancaster, Harrisburg, and much of the Poconos region.
Fitted with sensitive Defense Department technology, the radar-equipped blimp escaped from the military’s Aberdeen Proving Ground about 12:20 p.m. and drifted northward, climbing to about 16,000 feet, authorities said.
Power Mechanics is reporting the blimp came down “safely” on Wednesday afternoon.
An unmanned Army surveillance blimp floats through the air while dragging a tether line south of Millville, Pa., Wednesday, October 28, 2015.
About 18,000 customers were out of power.
Bloomsburg University cancelled classes for the day because of the outage.
Residents around the county have been tweeting photos and video of the blimp seemingly getting lower and lower to the ground.
It was not immediately clear how the blimp became detached from its mooring station at Aberdeen Proving Grounds.
Two F-16 fighter jets that cost just tens of millions were scrambled from the Air National Guard 177th Fighter Wing in Atlantic City to monitor JLENS, according to NORAD.
The FAA also tracked the balloon to keep it safely separated from other air traffic.
Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System (JLENS) is the technical name of the blimp and it is 200ft-long.
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NORAD says that they did nothing to bring the blimp down, although an auto-deflate mechanism may be responsible.
