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.
UA 1093
21–30 of 117 posts
Re: UA 1093
#22THIS is how you react to an incident. Bravo to this company.
Re: UA 1093
#23In 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.
Re: UA 1093
#24What 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.
Re: UA 1093
#25It 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.
What are the power requirements of ADS-B? How much more battery would the balloon have to lift?
Re: UA 1093
#26What 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.
The actual part they impacted seems rather small. It’s basically a 2lb sandbag with a solar panel stuck to it.
Re: UA 1093
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Anyone arguing against government regulation as a whole is completely delusional. Companies can't be trusted to regulate themselves.
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.
Re: UA 1093
#28What 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.
Re: UA 1093
#29> 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.
isn't the worst case it goes into the engine and it explodes/burns?
Re: UA 1093
#30It 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.
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.