Military ‘Blimp’ on the Loose Makes a Landing

The runaway military blimp belonging to the U.S. Defense Department is down, but only after it caused havoc on the ground as it flew over Pennsylvania for a few hours today.

A military recovery team was enroute, according to NORAD.

Military jets were said Wednesday afternoon to be tracking a surveillance blimp that inadvertently became unmoored from the U.S. Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.

At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said such accidents can happen and cited similar incidents with the surveillance blimps used to protect bases in Afghanistan.

The JLENS program raised eyebrows because of its huge price tag and 17 years of development, and a resulting system that has been plagued by software glitches and poor performance in bad weather. The blimp caused about 18,000 power outages as it dragged it’s tether, taking out several power lines.

“The aerostat moored at Edgewood broke free at around 11:54 a.m.; approximately 6,700 feet of tether are attached”. They are part of the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Netted Sensor System (JLENS), an aerial detection system created to track possible air, land and sea threats to the East Coast.

“We advise if you’re in the local area and you see it, don’t go near it and contact your local law enforcement”, said Lt. Joe Nawrocki, a Northern Command/Norad spokesman said in a phone interview from Colorado Springs, Colo. But winds at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, where the system is based, were in the single digits Wednesday, leaving the blimp’s escape a mystery for now.

“The chance of that happening is very small because the tether is made of Vectran and has withstood storms in excess of 100 knots”, the fact sheet says. They were meant to float at an altitude of about 10,000 feet, about one-third as high as a commercial airliner’s cruising altitude. “As it got closer to us, all of a sudden our lights started to flicker and we lost power”, he said.

But according to the Los Angeles Times, JLENS is doing a awful job, and doesn’t seem worth the $US2.7 billion invested in the program.

According to the latest NORAD tweet, the blimp now is “drifting northward & has descended near the ground”.

Before it landed, the blimp’s tail section broke away and landed about one-quarter of a mile from the remainder of the aircraft, Miller said.