> The system is designed to not pose a risk to human life in the worst case event of a collision. This is what the FAA 101 and ICAO weight limits are for. And indeed, there were no serious injuries and no depressurization event to my knowledge as a result of the collision.
This seems close to a worst case scenario for this failure mode, and everyone is still OK. I consider that good engineering.
WindBorne cofounder CEO (John Dean) here -- Thanks, indeed I think that a strike to the cockpit glass, in the corner where there is more stress concentration, is one of the worst places to hit for human safety. And indeed the system was designed to be safe in the event of a collision.
But still, in light of this I think we can do better. I think it's possible to operate the way we do and have a the mass distributed such that the only damage is ever cosmetic. We follow FAA 101 regulations on this but I want to have better internal impact modeling as well.
Hats off to you and your company. I wish more companies could put up a notice like you did, much less show up as a CEO on frickin' HN and be willing to take responsibility as well as desire to do better. I honestly am a little confused how a person like you exists. The FAA should put someone like you in charge of Boeing.
Please put pressure on the FAA to do better too. NOTAMS, as they currently are, are pretty useless, and allowing unmanned vessels to output ADS-B could be extremely beneficial.
Yea, the FAA does a lot and I think overall they do a great job, but I wish there was better systems for communications here. I think ultimately companies like WindBorne just have to go above and beyond what is required if they want to operate at scale safely in this space. And no one else operates balloons at the scale that we do, and safety has to be built into the design and operations regardless of how the official systems work.
It's unfortunate that this happened, but this will help drive better engineering decisions in the future for everyone. Glad everyone is mostly okay from this!
No, because the plane is designed to safely fly without an engine. They test the engines by shooting turkeys from the grocery store into them while they run.
Afterwards, they ship the entire engine, with turkey giblets and all, to a lab where the resulting damage is analyzed. Smells awful, according to the engineer I sat next to at a Thanksgiving dinner once...
I think GP meant structural damage to the airframe. That said, I think there are some modes of structural damage a modern plane can sustain and still fly, but to gp's point, probably not many.
The FAA limits the mass of a weather balloon for this reason. I also would not be surprised to see new regulation on the distribution of that mass as a result of this incident.
There are some limitations on such balloons already. For example, if the payload is 4-6lbs, stricter rules apply if the weight/size ratio is greater than three ounces per square inch (measured by the smallest surface on the payload).[1]
Also for larger balloons, any trailing antenna must break if subjected to an impact force of 50lbs, or the antenna must have colored streamers every 50ft.
The ideal measurement would be some sort of crash testing. eg: The payload is accelerated at some standard velocity towards some standard target that represents the weakest part of an airplane (either cockpit glass or leading edge of a wing) and must not damage the target beyond some threshold. But that seems like it would be expensive, since every change in payload would require re-testing. Limits on sectional density seem like a good compromise.
A reminder to those who presume regulators make the right decisions, a cheap ADSB out transponder would have prevented this incident, but putting one on a weather balloon is prohibited by the FAA.
An ADSB transponder, along with supporting electronics and battery will add to the weight of the aircraft. It makes it safer in one way, and less safe is another. This isn't quite the "slam dunk" you seem to believe.
Weather balloons already have restrictions on weight to minimize the consequences of collisions. The issue is that even if you can add a transmitter and meet the weight requirements, it's currently not possible to legally broadcast ADS-B data from a weather balloon.
They would need to increase the weight requirements if they're to add ADSB. Current ADSB transponders weigh as much as the entire weather balloon's package. Then add on the pounds of weight for batteries.
The uAvionix ping200X weighs 50 grams according to its datasheet.[1] With a 1.5W continuous power draw, a 60 gram lithium battery would power it for 8 hours, for a total of 110 grams. WindBorne balloons weigh 1.1kg at launch (including ballast), and the FAA limit for such balloons is 2kg.
The balloons likely already have batteries and GPS receivers. An extra radio and antenna would add a few grams of weight and tens of mW of power consumption. That could be well under one percent more weight.
It's much, much lighter than a radar reflector, which aircraft weather radar displays aren't even designed to display.
The FCC requires that airborne transmitters identify themselves by broadcasting the an FAA designator such as the aircraft registration number.[1] The FAA has no identification or registration process for small weather balloons. So this effectively prohibits them from broadcasting. It's possible to add a radar reflector, but they add significant weight and bulk to the balloon's payload. I think reflectors are only required for larger weather balloons.
The problem is we don't have a garbage collection method to get rid of counterproductive or even insane regulations, so they build up into a choking plaque over time.
There is a mechanism for this, internationally usually named some variant of a Law Commission [0]. The idea is to look for laws that are technically in effect but can rarely or never be applied. For example, the UK Law Commission boasts a repeal of 3000+ acts in its time [1], such as repealing rules for conducting slave trades that were made obsolete in the 1800s but not repealed at the time.
In addition to the sibling comment's mention of the Congressional Review Act for agency oversight, there is a US Office of the Law Revision Counsel [2]. It has an official website [3] which is beautifully old-fashioned, but looks to be purely a resource for accessing the letter of the law and doesn't recount its volume of repeals in the same way.
None of this matters if the insane or counterproductive regulations are deliberate and desirable for the current lawmakers, of course.
An agency can remove a regulation it created.
Congress (via the linked law) can also remove a regulation.
Congress can also create regulations via legislation (though they typically don't go to that level of detail).
And we have to remember, at one point, every regulation that exists was created to solve a problem / prevent a harm. The cost of removing that regulation prematurely is reintroducing that problem / harm.
The problem is more about regulatory capture. An industry adapts to a regulation, and creates winners and losers. Once the regulation no longer makes sense (costs taxpayers/consumers more than it benefits), those who are winning from it have a strong interest in keeping it around anyway.
A good example is the state franchise laws against car manufacturers owning dealerships. Why can't Toyota sell me a car directly? Direct manufacturer sales seem to work fine in other contexts (e.g. Ikea). In Europe they're moving more and more direct sales. There's no good reason to keep them here in the US, but the dealership owners who benefit from these laws are the only people impacted directly enough to bother hiring lobbyists.
Agreed. And, IMO, the fix to regulatory capture isn't adding a mechanism to directly make deregulation easier. Instead, it's to (somehow) remove the money from politics/campaigning.
Half the legislature campaigns on not doing anything if they get elected, though, and when they get elected, you get... Well, you get a lot of different things, most of them awful.
In hindsight, the fact that it was probably a balloon and not space debris makes a lot of sense. Something falling from space would only spend a few seconds at most in the zone where airplanes cruise but a weather balloon would be there significantly longer. Makes the chance of collisions much higher.
Really depends on how big the space debris was and whether it had slowed to terminal velocity (the speed where the force of gravity equals the force of drag).
I'd rather be in a plane hit by 1 gram piece of space debris than in one that hit a 1kg sandbag hanging from a balloon.
Curious too to learn more about what data, if any, is shared with ATC on the location of these balloons. Airspace is regularly blocked off for rockets and other use, but for many weather balloons the theory is 1) the sky is big, and 2) designs are meant to be that a strike with an aircraft wouldn’t cause significant damage. If this was an impact with a balloon payload then “2” looks problematic.
Isn't this pure statistics? The big sky isn't as big since planes always follow certain patterns and so do weather balloons (because wind also has patterns). Now someone needs to do some black magic with that model and calculate the arrival time distribution of accidents and you get to see if this is an outlier or not.
The birthday paradox seems relevant here as well: With 23 people, your chance of having a "collision" in birthdays is over 50%. With more objects in the sky, the chance of collision is likely greater than one would assume given the space they have to occupy.
Though the birthday paradox is concerned with self-collisions, I think since these are explicitly collisions with other objects it feels less paradoxical to compute
Related, i dont know what the technical term for this is, but was thinking about how because of speed, being in two places at once (collision) the equation depends greatly on speed. Simplistically, if planes traveled at the speed of light then an object on ANY point of their trajectory would collide.
Much more complex than simply amount of space times size of objects. Knowing theres a whole science / engineering behind this, Im just so curious about the people and practices that go into this part of travel especially air and space travel.
It is surprising that weather balloons don't have ADS-B out (or did this ballon have that and something about the system didn't work?). If it did work, ADS-B would have made this collision very avoidable.
ADS-B, as regulated, is a terrible solution for this stuff. EIRP requirements make it extremely impractical as a transmission solution for small devices, most ADS-B In equipment isn't designed to correctly alert for separation with non-fixed wing devices, and (due in no small part to the very high EIRP), there are concerns about both air-time saturation and management plane saturation (ie - ADS-B In equipment also wasn't designed to track very many entities).
Even a radar reflector would have helped a lot. ADS-B is off-limits for balloons, ultralights, hang-gliders, etc, and it seems like now that radio beacons can be manufactured very cheap & low power all those non-commercial aerial vehicles should be equipped.
For a 2.5 lb ground weight balloon, a radar reflector is likely still too heavy. The lightest weight marine radar reflector [1] I could find is about half a pound.
That being said, detection isn't everything; primary radar cannot make accurate altitude measurements, only bearing and range. While that's enough to route traffic around, it could be also mistaken for a false return.
Marine applications care a lot about durability and pretty much zero about weight, so I wouldn’t expect that to be representative of how light they can be. You could make a radar reflector from a bit of cardboard and aluminum foil.
It's not off limits in the regulatory sense. Balloons are generally exempted due to their size and power constraints. Per the submission, the balloon weighs 2.4 lbs at launch. That doesn't give them much room to add a transponder and battery for ADS-B while staying within the target weight limit.
47 CFR 87.107 requires that radios transmitters in aircraft broadcast an identification number, and the allowed forms of identification aren't permissive enough for non-registered aircraft.
ADS-B out is still relatively new (especially in aviation terms) so I expect we'll see this continue to evolve.
It's not off-limits. But, it's not required (for most balloons, ULs, etc). And due to cost and/or weight, people don't always use it when it's not mandatory.
The comments I was reading at ArsTechnica suggested that adding transponders was off-limits to balloons. The argument was that balloon operators wanted to add transponders but that it was resisted by FAA worrying about there being too many non-plane transponders for pilots/ATC to keep track of.
I obviously don't know which is right, but it does show that there is definitely confusion out there about the issue.
Some do. Edge of Space Sciences (EOSS) is group of citizen high altitude scientists, and their large balloon flights include certified ADS-B transponders [0] and radar corner reflectors. They also file their flights with the FAA to publish NOTAMS. They have significantly larger payloads than this, but are designed to quickly ascend to ~100kft and pop reducing the loiter time in congested airspace.
Project Loon balloons also show up on Flightaware, so they either have ADS-B or TIS-B.
A situation like this will almost certainly cause some congresspeople to fret and write bills that would require ADS-B on all balloons, which would be a death knell for amateur ballooning unless ADS-B (or "legacy" Mode A/C/S) transponders become significantly smaller and more affordable. Mode C/S transponders are already available in miniaturized form factors thanks to the UAS industry, and are designed to be interrogated by aircraft equipped with TCAS (i.e. all 10+ passenger aircraft) that provides pilots deconfliction commands automatically and with no ATC support. But they're still priced for industry, not amateurs.
The uAvionix EchoESX [1] claims 4W continuous and with antenna probably adds 400g (0.8lb.)
WindBorne claims "12+ days typical flight, with demonstrated capability for 75+ day missions." So 1150Wh minimum (80Ah at 4S, which is probably like 16lb.) But you're up in the atmosphere and probably need to heat that battery so... more. But we're already at 18lb additional weight... Maybe you could offset with solar panels...
But, given that the entire balloon and payload weighs 2.5lb we're already way off the edge of feasibility for an active ads-b out.
Maybe there's something that would only listen and then respond when it heard something and that would reduce the power draw. But we're needing something 2 orders of magnitude less massive.
About the same as a transponder, I think. According to the FAA many weather balloons operate their transponders (if equipped at all) intermittently to preserve battery.
Okay you two… Sugar and Art Bell. I had to get ChatGPT to refresh my memory, but I’m with you now… hovering like a fly, waiting for the windshield on the freeway.
> We have been coordinating with the FAA for the entire history of the company and file NOTAMs (aviation alerts) for every balloon we launch.
At this point, I'm pretty confident that NOTAMs exist as a way relegate all liability to pilots. Really it's 14 CFR 91.103, which opens with "Each pilot in command shall, before beginning a flight, become familiar with all available information concerning that flight", that allows NOTAMS to transfer liability.
Theoretically CFRs are limited to powers specifically authorized by congress, but in practice, they are full of overreach that is only limited when it becomes case law, but the FAA is so powerful that it can effectively shut down any organization trying to dispute them in federal courts, so there isn't really any case law limiting the scope of their CFRs.
NOTAM system is archaic and basically useless for this kind of thing. It's a blob of text which will not be specific, memorable, and actionable for an airline pilot, who is on their jetway at FL036 -- an altitude and speed where "see and avoid" doesn't really apply for a bunch of reasons -- and depending on ATC to route them around hazards.
There REALLY needs to be a unified ATC system that incorporates NOTAMS, traffic, and live position of whatever unmanned stuff is moving around. We have most of the tech deployed already. We have to integrate it.
Releasing sand will cause it to ascend, not descend. Balloons descend by reducing lift, which means releasing gas or allowing the balloon to burst and releasing a parachute (for a controlled descent, if you don't care about control, just let the balloon burst).
What I don't get is how did the pilots not see it? Are they that hard to see, or was vision obscured? The balloon in the attached picture looks pretty large.
Fighters can pick up balloons like this on radar, and you can see them in targeting pods (e.g. cued from the radar). You can see them with eyes if you get close, but it's not a guarantee.
> The system is designed to not pose a risk to human life in the worst case event of a collision. This is what the FAA 101 and ICAO weight limits are for. And indeed, there were no serious injuries and no depressurization event to my knowledge as a result of the collision.
This seems close to a worst case scenario for this failure mode, and everyone is still OK. I consider that good engineering.
WindBorne cofounder CEO (John Dean) here -- Thanks, indeed I think that a strike to the cockpit glass, in the corner where there is more stress concentration, is one of the worst places to hit for human safety. And indeed the system was designed to be safe in the event of a collision.
But still, in light of this I think we can do better. I think it's possible to operate the way we do and have a the mass distributed such that the only damage is ever cosmetic. We follow FAA 101 regulations on this but I want to have better internal impact modeling as well.
Hats off to you and your company. I wish more companies could put up a notice like you did, much less show up as a CEO on frickin' HN and be willing to take responsibility as well as desire to do better. I honestly am a little confused how a person like you exists. The FAA should put someone like you in charge of Boeing.
Please put pressure on the FAA to do better too. NOTAMS, as they currently are, are pretty useless, and allowing unmanned vessels to output ADS-B could be extremely beneficial.
Yea, the FAA does a lot and I think overall they do a great job, but I wish there was better systems for communications here. I think ultimately companies like WindBorne just have to go above and beyond what is required if they want to operate at scale safely in this space. And no one else operates balloons at the scale that we do, and safety has to be built into the design and operations regardless of how the official systems work.
Pretty great, public response from you to publish this and be in the comments here. Kudos. I hope more CEOs take your lead.
It's unfortunate that this happened, but this will help drive better engineering decisions in the future for everyone. Glad everyone is mostly okay from this!
isn't the worst case it goes into the engine and it explodes/burns?
No, because the plane is designed to safely fly without an engine. They test the engines by shooting turkeys from the grocery store into them while they run.
Afterwards, they ship the entire engine, with turkey giblets and all, to a lab where the resulting damage is analyzed. Smells awful, according to the engineer I sat next to at a Thanksgiving dinner once...
Hopefully the giblets at your Thanksgiving dinner didn't come from the engine-sliced turkeys...
There's even a whole Wikipedia article on the "chicken gun" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_gun
Exactly. The plane can land with one engine or even no engines, but it can't land without a pilot in a functioning cockpit.
As god as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly. Through jet engines.
Pretty sure even Les wouldn't have thought that ;-)
See, now I'm thinking of mayonnaise injectors to make instance turkey salad
without working one working engine - sure. with serious structural damage - perhaps not so much
Yes, with serious structural damage. It's part of certification process for the engine: https://youtu.be/iBqWS1hil18
I think GP meant structural damage to the airframe. That said, I think there are some modes of structural damage a modern plane can sustain and still fly, but to gp's point, probably not many.
yes I did :)
The FAA limits the mass of a weather balloon for this reason. I also would not be surprised to see new regulation on the distribution of that mass as a result of this incident.
There are some limitations on such balloons already. For example, if the payload is 4-6lbs, stricter rules apply if the weight/size ratio is greater than three ounces per square inch (measured by the smallest surface on the payload).[1]
Also for larger balloons, any trailing antenna must break if subjected to an impact force of 50lbs, or the antenna must have colored streamers every 50ft.
The ideal measurement would be some sort of crash testing. eg: The payload is accelerated at some standard velocity towards some standard target that represents the weakest part of an airplane (either cockpit glass or leading edge of a wing) and must not damage the target beyond some threshold. But that seems like it would be expensive, since every change in payload would require re-testing. Limits on sectional density seem like a good compromise.
1. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-F...
Depressurizations are worse than losing an engine. It can incapacitate the flight crew in seconds.
A reminder for those in the back, government regulation made this safe (FAA limits).
And yes, this is good engineering, but through decades of learning crowdfunded with tax dollars.
A reminder to those who presume regulators make the right decisions, a cheap ADSB out transponder would have prevented this incident, but putting one on a weather balloon is prohibited by the FAA.
An ADSB transponder, along with supporting electronics and battery will add to the weight of the aircraft. It makes it safer in one way, and less safe is another. This isn't quite the "slam dunk" you seem to believe.
Weather balloons already have restrictions on weight to minimize the consequences of collisions. The issue is that even if you can add a transmitter and meet the weight requirements, it's currently not possible to legally broadcast ADS-B data from a weather balloon.
They would need to increase the weight requirements if they're to add ADSB. Current ADSB transponders weigh as much as the entire weather balloon's package. Then add on the pounds of weight for batteries.
The uAvionix ping200X weighs 50 grams according to its datasheet.[1] With a 1.5W continuous power draw, a 60 gram lithium battery would power it for 8 hours, for a total of 110 grams. WindBorne balloons weigh 1.1kg at launch (including ballast), and the FAA limit for such balloons is 2kg.
1. https://uavionix.com/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2025/07/...
The balloons likely already have batteries and GPS receivers. An extra radio and antenna would add a few grams of weight and tens of mW of power consumption. That could be well under one percent more weight.
It's much, much lighter than a radar reflector, which aircraft weather radar displays aren't even designed to display.
Prohibited? Why?
Will air travel become safer because we don't know where they are?
The FCC requires that airborne transmitters identify themselves by broadcasting the an FAA designator such as the aircraft registration number.[1] The FAA has no identification or registration process for small weather balloons. So this effectively prohibits them from broadcasting. It's possible to add a radar reflector, but they add significant weight and bulk to the balloon's payload. I think reflectors are only required for larger weather balloons.
1. See § 87.107: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2024-title47-vol5/pd...
What happens to the payload mass when you add the transponder?
It could easily be less than a percent of added weight, considering that there's probably already batteries and a GPS receiver on the balloon.
Anyone arguing against government regulation as a whole is completely delusional. Companies can't be trusted to regulate themselves.
This event was unsafe, despite being wholly within the regulations, but in the comments of this post, the CEO of the company has made a promise to do better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45656044#45659295
Government regulators have failed, but at least the company is making an effort to prevent this from happening again.
The problem is we don't have a garbage collection method to get rid of counterproductive or even insane regulations, so they build up into a choking plaque over time.
There is a mechanism for this, internationally usually named some variant of a Law Commission [0]. The idea is to look for laws that are technically in effect but can rarely or never be applied. For example, the UK Law Commission boasts a repeal of 3000+ acts in its time [1], such as repealing rules for conducting slave trades that were made obsolete in the 1800s but not repealed at the time.
In addition to the sibling comment's mention of the Congressional Review Act for agency oversight, there is a US Office of the Law Revision Counsel [2]. It has an official website [3] which is beautifully old-fashioned, but looks to be purely a resource for accessing the letter of the law and doesn't recount its volume of repeals in the same way.
None of this matters if the insane or counterproductive regulations are deliberate and desirable for the current lawmakers, of course.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_commission [1] https://lawcom.gov.uk/repeals/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_the_Law_Revision_Cou... [3] https://uscode.house.gov/
https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_agency_rules_repealed_under_...
You can argue that is not effective enough perhaps, but the mechanism itself exists.
It needs to be much stronger than the ability to pass new regulations, but it's much weaker instead.
Is that really true?
An agency can remove a regulation it created. Congress (via the linked law) can also remove a regulation. Congress can also create regulations via legislation (though they typically don't go to that level of detail).
And we have to remember, at one point, every regulation that exists was created to solve a problem / prevent a harm. The cost of removing that regulation prematurely is reintroducing that problem / harm.
The problem is more about regulatory capture. An industry adapts to a regulation, and creates winners and losers. Once the regulation no longer makes sense (costs taxpayers/consumers more than it benefits), those who are winning from it have a strong interest in keeping it around anyway.
A good example is the state franchise laws against car manufacturers owning dealerships. Why can't Toyota sell me a car directly? Direct manufacturer sales seem to work fine in other contexts (e.g. Ikea). In Europe they're moving more and more direct sales. There's no good reason to keep them here in the US, but the dealership owners who benefit from these laws are the only people impacted directly enough to bother hiring lobbyists.
Agreed. And, IMO, the fix to regulatory capture isn't adding a mechanism to directly make deregulation easier. Instead, it's to (somehow) remove the money from politics/campaigning.
> And we have to remember, at one point, every regulation that exists was created to solve a problem / prevent a harm.
It would be comforting to believe so, but that requires ignoring every aspect of human nature.
We do, it's called the legislature.
Half the legislature campaigns on not doing anything if they get elected, though, and when they get elected, you get... Well, you get a lot of different things, most of them awful.
I'm interested in a system that would actually collect the garbage rather than just being theoretically capable of it but in practice not doing it.
It would probably work about as well as a system where all contracts and debts get voided every 7 years.
It's building on quicksand, but it's certainly not unprecedented.
In hindsight, the fact that it was probably a balloon and not space debris makes a lot of sense. Something falling from space would only spend a few seconds at most in the zone where airplanes cruise but a weather balloon would be there significantly longer. Makes the chance of collisions much higher.
There are thousands of flights every day for decades. There's going to be a collision at some point.
I mean, it also makes sense considering space debris would have hit that plane with significantly more force than a busted window.
Really depends on how big the space debris was and whether it had slowed to terminal velocity (the speed where the force of gravity equals the force of drag).
I'd rather be in a plane hit by 1 gram piece of space debris than in one that hit a 1kg sandbag hanging from a balloon.
Huh, I just saw the Scott Manly video where he called out a comment of someone mentioning a weather balloon. Props to that guy.
Discussions
(399 points, 2 days ago, 222 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45636285
(35 points, 2 days ago, 55 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45633191
Related: It was a weather balloon, not space debris, that struck a United Airlines plane (12 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45652120
Interesting. The “big sky” theory has its limits.
Curious too to learn more about what data, if any, is shared with ATC on the location of these balloons. Airspace is regularly blocked off for rockets and other use, but for many weather balloons the theory is 1) the sky is big, and 2) designs are meant to be that a strike with an aircraft wouldn’t cause significant damage. If this was an impact with a balloon payload then “2” looks problematic.
Isn't this pure statistics? The big sky isn't as big since planes always follow certain patterns and so do weather balloons (because wind also has patterns). Now someone needs to do some black magic with that model and calculate the arrival time distribution of accidents and you get to see if this is an outlier or not.
The birthday paradox seems relevant here as well: With 23 people, your chance of having a "collision" in birthdays is over 50%. With more objects in the sky, the chance of collision is likely greater than one would assume given the space they have to occupy.
Though the birthday paradox is concerned with self-collisions, I think since these are explicitly collisions with other objects it feels less paradoxical to compute
Related, i dont know what the technical term for this is, but was thinking about how because of speed, being in two places at once (collision) the equation depends greatly on speed. Simplistically, if planes traveled at the speed of light then an object on ANY point of their trajectory would collide.
Much more complex than simply amount of space times size of objects. Knowing theres a whole science / engineering behind this, Im just so curious about the people and practices that go into this part of travel especially air and space travel.
> planes always follow certain patterns
At any particular and above a certain flight level maybe.
OT, but the response from Windborne and its CEO makes me think it would be a great place to work.
https://windbornesystems.com/faq#airplanes
https://windbornesystems.com/blog/ua-1093
It is surprising that weather balloons don't have ADS-B out (or did this ballon have that and something about the system didn't work?). If it did work, ADS-B would have made this collision very avoidable.
ADS-B, as regulated, is a terrible solution for this stuff. EIRP requirements make it extremely impractical as a transmission solution for small devices, most ADS-B In equipment isn't designed to correctly alert for separation with non-fixed wing devices, and (due in no small part to the very high EIRP), there are concerns about both air-time saturation and management plane saturation (ie - ADS-B In equipment also wasn't designed to track very many entities).
Even a radar reflector would have helped a lot. ADS-B is off-limits for balloons, ultralights, hang-gliders, etc, and it seems like now that radio beacons can be manufactured very cheap & low power all those non-commercial aerial vehicles should be equipped.
For a 2.5 lb ground weight balloon, a radar reflector is likely still too heavy. The lightest weight marine radar reflector [1] I could find is about half a pound.
[1] https://www.westmarine.com/plastimo-tubular-radar-reflector-...
you can make one out of cardboard and aluminum foil (better yet, aluminized mylar (space blanket) on foam) on the order of a few oz. https://www.instructables.com/Lightweight-Radar-Reflector/
A radar reflector such as that, or this (https://overlookhorizon.com/product/radar-reflector/, which is ~300g) has roughly the same RCS as a small (piper cherokee) to medium (gulfstream) sized aircraft.
That being said, detection isn't everything; primary radar cannot make accurate altitude measurements, only bearing and range. While that's enough to route traffic around, it could be also mistaken for a false return.
Any idea how much that homemade one weighs? 300g for the commercial one is more than half a pound, similar to the one I linked but a different shape.
Marine applications care a lot about durability and pretty much zero about weight, so I wouldn’t expect that to be representative of how light they can be. You could make a radar reflector from a bit of cardboard and aluminum foil.
Off limits? What's the reason? Why not ADS-B everything in the air and let the computers sort it out?
It's not off limits in the regulatory sense. Balloons are generally exempted due to their size and power constraints. Per the submission, the balloon weighs 2.4 lbs at launch. That doesn't give them much room to add a transponder and battery for ADS-B while staying within the target weight limit.
47 CFR 87.107 requires that radios transmitters in aircraft broadcast an identification number, and the allowed forms of identification aren't permissive enough for non-registered aircraft.
ADS-B out is still relatively new (especially in aviation terms) so I expect we'll see this continue to evolve.
It's not off-limits. But, it's not required (for most balloons, ULs, etc). And due to cost and/or weight, people don't always use it when it's not mandatory.
The comments I was reading at ArsTechnica suggested that adding transponders was off-limits to balloons. The argument was that balloon operators wanted to add transponders but that it was resisted by FAA worrying about there being too many non-plane transponders for pilots/ATC to keep track of.
I obviously don't know which is right, but it does show that there is definitely confusion out there about the issue.
Some do. Edge of Space Sciences (EOSS) is group of citizen high altitude scientists, and their large balloon flights include certified ADS-B transponders [0] and radar corner reflectors. They also file their flights with the FAA to publish NOTAMS. They have significantly larger payloads than this, but are designed to quickly ascend to ~100kft and pop reducing the loiter time in congested airspace.
Project Loon balloons also show up on Flightaware, so they either have ADS-B or TIS-B.
A situation like this will almost certainly cause some congresspeople to fret and write bills that would require ADS-B on all balloons, which would be a death knell for amateur ballooning unless ADS-B (or "legacy" Mode A/C/S) transponders become significantly smaller and more affordable. Mode C/S transponders are already available in miniaturized form factors thanks to the UAS industry, and are designed to be interrogated by aircraft equipped with TCAS (i.e. all 10+ passenger aircraft) that provides pilots deconfliction commands automatically and with no ATC support. But they're still priced for industry, not amateurs.
[0] https://www.eoss.org/ Look for N991SS, N992SS, N461SG.
What are the power requirements of ADS-B? How much more battery would the balloon have to lift?
The uAvionix EchoESX [1] claims 4W continuous and with antenna probably adds 400g (0.8lb.)
WindBorne claims "12+ days typical flight, with demonstrated capability for 75+ day missions." So 1150Wh minimum (80Ah at 4S, which is probably like 16lb.) But you're up in the atmosphere and probably need to heat that battery so... more. But we're already at 18lb additional weight... Maybe you could offset with solar panels...
But, given that the entire balloon and payload weighs 2.5lb we're already way off the edge of feasibility for an active ads-b out.
Maybe there's something that would only listen and then respond when it heard something and that would reduce the power draw. But we're needing something 2 orders of magnitude less massive.
[1] https://uavionix.com/general-aviation/echoesx/
About the same as a transponder, I think. According to the FAA many weather balloons operate their transponders (if equipped at all) intermittently to preserve battery.
Google's late great balloon project wasn't about weather but it did regularly show up on ADS-B
Who would have believed, what was suspected of being a mysterious malevolence coming from outer space, was just a quaint weather balloon all along!
Somehow that rings some faint bell but can't quite put my finger on it...
It's probably a decorated bell, some form of art bell ...
Okay you two… Sugar and Art Bell. I had to get ChatGPT to refresh my memory, but I’m with you now… hovering like a fly, waiting for the windshield on the freeway.
Give me... sugar. More. More.
Context:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/mystery-object-hits-united-airline...
https://www.financialexpress.com/world-news/us-news/injured-...
> We have been coordinating with the FAA for the entire history of the company and file NOTAMs (aviation alerts) for every balloon we launch.
At this point, I'm pretty confident that NOTAMs exist as a way relegate all liability to pilots. Really it's 14 CFR 91.103, which opens with "Each pilot in command shall, before beginning a flight, become familiar with all available information concerning that flight", that allows NOTAMS to transfer liability.
Theoretically CFRs are limited to powers specifically authorized by congress, but in practice, they are full of overreach that is only limited when it becomes case law, but the FAA is so powerful that it can effectively shut down any organization trying to dispute them in federal courts, so there isn't really any case law limiting the scope of their CFRs.
NOTAM system is archaic and basically useless for this kind of thing. It's a blob of text which will not be specific, memorable, and actionable for an airline pilot, who is on their jetway at FL036 -- an altitude and speed where "see and avoid" doesn't really apply for a bunch of reasons -- and depending on ATC to route them around hazards.
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/31058/are-weath...
There REALLY needs to be a unified ATC system that incorporates NOTAMS, traffic, and live position of whatever unmanned stuff is moving around. We have most of the tech deployed already. We have to integrate it.
I wonder how much damage to the society should Musk do before people stop posting links to Twitter.
Do you stop using American products when you don't agree with the ones running it?
I don't know why you would expect a forum of wannabe tech startup founders to turn on Elon Musk, many people here still idolize him.
What changes does one make to a balloon to minimize time spent between specific altitudes?
The balloon has a sand ballast that it can release sand from to descend.
Releasing sand will cause it to ascend, not descend. Balloons descend by reducing lift, which means releasing gas or allowing the balloon to burst and releasing a parachute (for a controlled descent, if you don't care about control, just let the balloon burst).
The unfortunate irony is not lost on me that Windbourne's H1 is "record breaking Weather Balloons".
I don't think any company would want this record. I am very glad the pilot and the souls on board are safe.
THIS is how you react to an incident. Bravo to this company.
What I don't get is how did the pilots not see it? Are they that hard to see, or was vision obscured? The balloon in the attached picture looks pretty large.
I believe it was night out, so you wouldn't really have any light to illuminate it externally.
At normal cruise, a B737 is travelling at 700 feet/second. You're not going to have much time to do anything but go, "oh, fuck!"
The actual part they impacted seems rather small. It’s basically a 2lb sandbag with a solar panel stuck to it.
Fighters can pick up balloons like this on radar, and you can see them in targeting pods (e.g. cued from the radar). You can see them with eyes if you get close, but it's not a guarantee.
The second photo ..
https://windbornesystems.com/mission
How easy are these baloons to track? What prevents a bad actor from using them to cause damage?
It's very hard to make it go to a specific place of the actor's choice.
There were attempts to use balloons as long range weapons in WW2 but they weren't very effective.
Bad actors have a lot of ways to cause damage, most of them much more effective than balloons.
Glad it wasn't this guy:
https://www.redbull.com/int-en/vincent-reffet-and-yves-rossy...
LOL
looks like the window frame took the brunt of the hit.
wonder if things would have been different if it hit the center of the window