It seems that the F-18 has a max ceiling of about 40K. The F-22 is the only a/c that can get close enough to 65K to do the job. Navy had the desire, but USAF had the ability.
F-15 has a high enough ceiling - the same as the F-22 - and was used for testing an ASAT system back in the 1980s. The F-16, at 58K feet, could do it but with less margin of error.
Sidewinder may not have worked - the thermal image of a balloon may not be sufficient for an infrared-seeking missile. Cannon are problematic as well, as a balloon that large likely has multiple gas cells and the shell very well might have passed through easily enough to not make an adequate hole to vent the gasses - the impact with the cloth may not have been sufficient for a contact fuse (when Frank Luke won his MoH and two DSCs in twelve days killing 14 German balloons and 4 planes, he was using special incendiary rounds in his machine guns). A radar homing missile with a proximity fuse like the Slammer was the best choice. The optimal munition was an AIM-120 AAMRAM (the Slammer).
An F/A-18 Superhornet was non-optimal as its service ceiling is 50K feet, three miles below the balloon. The only US operational fighters with a ceiling of 65K feet are the F-22 and F-15. The F/A-18 and F-35 are around 50,000 feet, the F-16 at 58,000 feet.
Theoretically it could have been shot down with a RIM-174 SAM from an Aegis-equipped destroyer of cruiser, if the geometry was correct. Since those missiles cost over four times as much as a Slammer - not to mention that the cost of a fighter sortie is FAR lower than that of moving a major surface combatant and is faster - that was a non-optimal choice.
My guess is that by the time the balloon was detected and plotted, it was over the US and DoD decided to NOT shoot it down overland due to concerns over the impact of the payload crashing on land - such as whether it had a nuclear power source (the Soviet block did use beta-emitting isotopes as a source of electricity - they produce a VERY constant current which is useful for sensitive detectors - I have used a Ni-63 source in an electron capture detector for chromatography to look for sub-part per billion levels of halogen-containing organics from water samples) or was equipped with a self-destruct explosive charge.
One thing it wasn't was a "weather balloon" as the PRC claims - not since it appears to have had engines and a maneuver capability. The course IMHO was suspicious in that it tracked right through the area with all three US Minuteman III ICBM wings and three Global Strike Command bomber bases.
The Sidewinder was the missile used, and it worked just fine. Current gen AIM-9's have more sophisticated seekers than just thermal. Government officials, includinging DOD folks, lie just as much now as they did in Vietnam- their stories change every day.
F-22s out of Anchorage could have taken it down over millions of square acres of absolute nothing. And there's no way the radar at Clear didn't see it coming.
Biden and his cowardly, lackey military command are lying to us again. SOP for that crowd. No honor, from Biden, Austin and on down the entire chain of command. They showed their color, yellow, with the Afghanistan debacle.
I don't know what the current coverage zone for Clear AFS is, but when it was part of the PAVE PAWS/BMEWS system, it only had a coverage zone of about 260 degrees centered on due north - it missed most of the northern Pacific. The old BMEWS radar out of Beale AFB in California covered the Pacific approach that the balloon took. The COBRA DANE radar at Eareckson Air Station (formerly Shemya AFS) MIGHT have picked something up, although it is primarily focused to monitor missile tests. Thing is, one could not ACT against it until it entered NORAD airspace. The AC&W radar sites are generally GCI radars with limited range - the AN/FPS-117 at Murphy Dome NE of Fairbanks has a range of about only 250 miles. Site A-08 at Cold Bay has the same minimally attended GCI radar - the closest one to the balloon path - and it would not have had the range to detect it. The three remaining DEW line sites are in northern Alaska and focused on Russia. The radar coverage that existed when my Dad was with the 6th Strategic Wing at Eilson from 75-7 has been severely thinned since the late 1980s, with a lot of the early warning system now based on satellites. Early warning satellites designed to detect thermal bloom from a missile launch wouldn't have alerted on the launch of a what looked like a weather balloon. Heck - had we been flying a RIVET JOINT out of Eareckson as was common in the 1970s the ELINT bird might have picked up the telemetry.
Luke's WWI balloon targets were inflated with hydrogen, not helium like this balloon was. Even an incendiary round won't cause helium to burst into flame - it is a completely inert gas.
True....my point was that it took specialized rounds. The small holes from a machine gun ball round - as were often used in WWI against other airplances - was not enough to deflate the sack. At that, the low airspeed of a WWI fighter compared to a modern one meant that the fighter was likely to hit those observation balloons with a higher number of rounds per pass than a modern jet fighter.. The cannon used on a modern fighter like an F-22 has a cyclic rate of fire 4x that of the Lewis MG on a Spad S.XIII, but the F-22 is flying 8x as fast, meaning it would put HALF the rounds into the balloon per pass as the WWI Spad. Since the primary ammunition for the M61A2 Vulcan is the M53 API round likely to pass clean through balloon fabric, the new PGU-28 round is also armor piercing and likely to penetrate through and through rather than igniting the nose incendiary, and the M56 HE round is primarily loaded as an anti-personnel round for strafing ground targets. The M53 AP incendiary MIGHT have worked on an H2 filled balloon, but not this one for the reasons you and I note. What is needed is an HE weapon that throws a lot of shrapnel forward to shred large areas of the fabric. In terms of modern US air-to-air or ground-to-air ordnance, that means a missile.
On a deployment to Guam back in '86 with a Seabee battalion, we had a standby generator project on the Naval Mag. Within earshot of the project site was a nondescript building for the EOD unit stationed there. No windows, big doors, definitely been there awhile and surrounded by jungle on the sides... and stenciled on the door "Where no man has gone before." Chills...
"When you are well trained and well led with the right climate - things, in this case it really did, can come out of the blue that you haven't EXACTLY trained for, but ... you've done some things kind of like it."
Love to see tales like this when it's crunch time.
When I was in Squadron Command, that became our squadron motto; we put it in all our communications and our email signatures. It genuinely started to change the culture within because we started to believe it ourselves. “Yeah, we can do that.”
Would have preferred to have seen an F/A18 from whidbey island launch an aim 9 as that thing crossed the western adiz boundary.
It seems that the F-18 has a max ceiling of about 40K. The F-22 is the only a/c that can get close enough to 65K to do the job. Navy had the desire, but USAF had the ability.
F-15 has a high enough ceiling - the same as the F-22 - and was used for testing an ASAT system back in the 1980s. The F-16, at 58K feet, could do it but with less margin of error.
Sidewinder may not have worked - the thermal image of a balloon may not be sufficient for an infrared-seeking missile. Cannon are problematic as well, as a balloon that large likely has multiple gas cells and the shell very well might have passed through easily enough to not make an adequate hole to vent the gasses - the impact with the cloth may not have been sufficient for a contact fuse (when Frank Luke won his MoH and two DSCs in twelve days killing 14 German balloons and 4 planes, he was using special incendiary rounds in his machine guns). A radar homing missile with a proximity fuse like the Slammer was the best choice. The optimal munition was an AIM-120 AAMRAM (the Slammer).
An F/A-18 Superhornet was non-optimal as its service ceiling is 50K feet, three miles below the balloon. The only US operational fighters with a ceiling of 65K feet are the F-22 and F-15. The F/A-18 and F-35 are around 50,000 feet, the F-16 at 58,000 feet.
Theoretically it could have been shot down with a RIM-174 SAM from an Aegis-equipped destroyer of cruiser, if the geometry was correct. Since those missiles cost over four times as much as a Slammer - not to mention that the cost of a fighter sortie is FAR lower than that of moving a major surface combatant and is faster - that was a non-optimal choice.
My guess is that by the time the balloon was detected and plotted, it was over the US and DoD decided to NOT shoot it down overland due to concerns over the impact of the payload crashing on land - such as whether it had a nuclear power source (the Soviet block did use beta-emitting isotopes as a source of electricity - they produce a VERY constant current which is useful for sensitive detectors - I have used a Ni-63 source in an electron capture detector for chromatography to look for sub-part per billion levels of halogen-containing organics from water samples) or was equipped with a self-destruct explosive charge.
One thing it wasn't was a "weather balloon" as the PRC claims - not since it appears to have had engines and a maneuver capability. The course IMHO was suspicious in that it tracked right through the area with all three US Minuteman III ICBM wings and three Global Strike Command bomber bases.
The Sidewinder was the missile used, and it worked just fine. Current gen AIM-9's have more sophisticated seekers than just thermal. Government officials, includinging DOD folks, lie just as much now as they did in Vietnam- their stories change every day.
F-22s out of Anchorage could have taken it down over millions of square acres of absolute nothing. And there's no way the radar at Clear didn't see it coming.
Biden and his cowardly, lackey military command are lying to us again. SOP for that crowd. No honor, from Biden, Austin and on down the entire chain of command. They showed their color, yellow, with the Afghanistan debacle.
I don't know what the current coverage zone for Clear AFS is, but when it was part of the PAVE PAWS/BMEWS system, it only had a coverage zone of about 260 degrees centered on due north - it missed most of the northern Pacific. The old BMEWS radar out of Beale AFB in California covered the Pacific approach that the balloon took. The COBRA DANE radar at Eareckson Air Station (formerly Shemya AFS) MIGHT have picked something up, although it is primarily focused to monitor missile tests. Thing is, one could not ACT against it until it entered NORAD airspace. The AC&W radar sites are generally GCI radars with limited range - the AN/FPS-117 at Murphy Dome NE of Fairbanks has a range of about only 250 miles. Site A-08 at Cold Bay has the same minimally attended GCI radar - the closest one to the balloon path - and it would not have had the range to detect it. The three remaining DEW line sites are in northern Alaska and focused on Russia. The radar coverage that existed when my Dad was with the 6th Strategic Wing at Eilson from 75-7 has been severely thinned since the late 1980s, with a lot of the early warning system now based on satellites. Early warning satellites designed to detect thermal bloom from a missile launch wouldn't have alerted on the launch of a what looked like a weather balloon. Heck - had we been flying a RIVET JOINT out of Eareckson as was common in the 1970s the ELINT bird might have picked up the telemetry.
Luke's WWI balloon targets were inflated with hydrogen, not helium like this balloon was. Even an incendiary round won't cause helium to burst into flame - it is a completely inert gas.
True....my point was that it took specialized rounds. The small holes from a machine gun ball round - as were often used in WWI against other airplances - was not enough to deflate the sack. At that, the low airspeed of a WWI fighter compared to a modern one meant that the fighter was likely to hit those observation balloons with a higher number of rounds per pass than a modern jet fighter.. The cannon used on a modern fighter like an F-22 has a cyclic rate of fire 4x that of the Lewis MG on a Spad S.XIII, but the F-22 is flying 8x as fast, meaning it would put HALF the rounds into the balloon per pass as the WWI Spad. Since the primary ammunition for the M61A2 Vulcan is the M53 API round likely to pass clean through balloon fabric, the new PGU-28 round is also armor piercing and likely to penetrate through and through rather than igniting the nose incendiary, and the M56 HE round is primarily loaded as an anti-personnel round for strafing ground targets. The M53 AP incendiary MIGHT have worked on an H2 filled balloon, but not this one for the reasons you and I note. What is needed is an HE weapon that throws a lot of shrapnel forward to shred large areas of the fabric. In terms of modern US air-to-air or ground-to-air ordnance, that means a missile.
On a deployment to Guam back in '86 with a Seabee battalion, we had a standby generator project on the Naval Mag. Within earshot of the project site was a nondescript building for the EOD unit stationed there. No windows, big doors, definitely been there awhile and surrounded by jungle on the sides... and stenciled on the door "Where no man has gone before." Chills...
Good stuff.
"When you are well trained and well led with the right climate - things, in this case it really did, can come out of the blue that you haven't EXACTLY trained for, but ... you've done some things kind of like it."
Love to see tales like this when it's crunch time.
A well deserved BZ.
Thanks Sal!
I was in ordnance and worked with some of the EOD guys over the years. They were solid professionals.
Great photos. I would be the guy leaning back holding onto the gunwale, staying out of the way of guys who know what they are doing.
I have realized that most of the UFOs dismissed as "weather balloons" during the Cold War were likely, in fact, weather balloons.
HUZZAH!
Should check balloon remains for more Biden classified docs.
When I was in Squadron Command, that became our squadron motto; we put it in all our communications and our email signatures. It genuinely started to change the culture within because we started to believe it ourselves. “Yeah, we can do that.”