Hobby club misses balloon after downing soldier in US US Senator Fetterman in hospital because of depression

It is still not clear what type of aircraft the US Air Force shot down over the weekend in the Yukon over Alaska and Lake Huron. US President Joe Biden also had no news on Thursday. “Most likely,” however, according to Biden, they were balloons. An assumption that could now be substantiated by information from a balloon club: the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade has lost one of its flying objects.

This writes the association for hobby pilots in a blog post, which was first reported by the aviation magazine “Aviation Week”. According to this, a balloon of the “missing in action” club has disappeared in action, and that in the same region where the US military had taken down the three unknown flying objects. According to the amateur pilots, the last radio contact with their balloon was on the night from Friday to Saturday when their plane passed an uninhabited island in Alaska.

The balloon is a so-called “pico balloon” that is filled with hydrogen, carries a GPS transmitter and can fly at an altitude of about 14 kilometers. These balloons are popular with amateur clubs and hobbyists.

According to Aviation Week, this information is consistent with time, altitude and location information published by the Air Force on the use of a “Sidewinder” missile by an F-22 class air fighter: on Saturday morning it shot down a flying plane the size of a car. object over the Yukon.

However, it’s hard to determine whether it was actually the balloon of the hobby pilot from Illinois: According to Canadian officials, the debris is in a very remote area covered in ice and snow. It is therefore difficult to save them for analysis.

Before disappearing, the amateur pilot’s balloon was on the road for more than 123 days. The group has not yet made any explicit assumptions about a connection between their loss and the military shooting. However, according to a spokeswoman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command, available to the American medium Politico, there is contact between the balloon club and the FBI: “As far as I know, the FBI has spoken with this hobby group and I expect that the task force [des Nationalen Sicherheitsrats] learn more about the possible identification of the objects.”

Among balloon enthusiasts, it’s quite possible that the events are related. “I suspect they were probably pico balloons,” Tom Medlin told Aviation Week. Medlin currently flies three pico balloons in the northern and southern hemispheres. Ron Meadows, creator of pico balloons and founder of Scientific Balloon Solutions, told the magazine, “I myself tried to contact the military and the FBI to tell them what these things are likely to be. But I just got brushed off. They won’t look very good if they turn out [Pico-Ballons] shot”.

Neither the US Air Force nor the FBI have commented on the properties of the flying objects.