An unmanned military surveillance blimp that has detached from its mooring station in Maryland landed in Pennsylvania after a four-hour floating, authorities said on Wednesday. It covered about 241 kilometres in all. Two Air National Guard F-16 fighters were scrambled to monitor its movements, while its trailing tether took out power lines in Pennsylvania, causing blackouts across the state.
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The town of Bloomsburg fielded numerous calls from people who said they had spied the wayward blimp, a town official said. Witnesses are reporting a transformer blew up from the blimp’s mooring line getting snagged on power lines.
NORAD officials have confirmed to NBC News that the blimp is flying a few 16,000 feet over New Wilmington, Pennsylvania.
The craft even knocked out power to the State Police barracks at Bloomsburg before settling in a wooded hollow, where it was swiftly cordoned off while military personnel began arriving to retrieve it, State Police Capt. David Young said. 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.
PPL Electric said the blimp caused power outages affecting more that 20,000 homes and businesses.
That includes an automatic deflation system that is created to deflate the blimp should it go astray, but a NORAD spokesman said Wednesday it was unclear whether the system is what deflated the blimp to bring it down in Pennsylvania.
The system is used in Iraq and Afghanistan to provide ground surveillance around US bases. The 242-foot long JLENS aerostats are created to operate at altitudes of up to 10,000 feet, and can stay aloft for up to 30 days at a time before being retrieved for maintenance. “This happens in bad weather”.
At Aberdeen Proving Ground, the blimp is normally tethered and carried by a 242-foot balloon.
“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.
The Defense Department’s own testers have raised doubts about JLENS.
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Meanwhile, the runaway blimp program is getting wads of attention at the same time that Washington is passing a budget deal that squeezes popular domestic programs like Medicare and Social Security disability payments, so that we can build more of these dubious dirigible-like thingees.
