Google Loon balloon crashes near Yakima
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Google Loon balloon crashes near Yakima
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Re: Google Loon balloon crashes near Yakima
#2Guess that's a hazzard of balloons all over the place. Hope one does not take out a jet.
Re: Google Loon balloon crashes near Yakima
#3Guess that's a hazzard of balloons all over the place. Hope one does not take out a jet.
The chances of hitting a jet are remote, the balloon would have to loiter at the right altitude for that chance to increase appreciably. Most will go higher, pop and then fall.
The barrage balloons of WW-II had to be anchored very carefully to avoid having them go into the stratosphere. As the balloon expands (which it does when it goes higher) it will become more buoyant, not less so there is a positive feedback loop in there which usually ends in destruction unless you take precautions. Such anchoring requires very long cables, which makes them a bad choice to defend against jets.
So, the risks are non-zero and if one were to get sucked into a jet engine (especially the payload portion) the mayhem would be considerable, but they are so small that a 'notice to airmen' suffices unless you're operating very close to an airfield when you launch.
What is interesting about this incident is how far the balloon came down from where it was launched, it must have travelled for a long time, maybe even circumnavigated the globe more than once before landing.
Re: Google Loon balloon crashes near Yakima
#4Guess that's a hazzard of balloons all over the place. Hope one does not take out a jet.
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Re: Google Loon balloon crashes near Yakima
#5Guess that's a hazzard of balloons all over the place. Hope one does not take out a jet.
Balloons are launched all the time, Google's balloons are no different than the many many weather balloons, etc everyday. Their regulations are pretty easy [1] to find and follow. Basically, you call them, let them know when and where it's going up, when and where it's going down, and they'll put out a notice that pilots look at letting them know that there's a balloon out there they should look out for. If it gets loose, you call them again, say where you think it's going, etc, and they'll update the notifications accordingly. Stuff like this has been handled for a very long time.
Re: Google Loon balloon crashes near Yakima
#6In the 90s, I would sometimes trip over ethernet cables that had been strung between server racks, across an aisle.
Will this be the decade where I get to experience being struck by falling routers and switches, far from any data center?
(EDIT: Simply remarking on novelty of problem and upward growth of network. No criticism of any firm implied or intended.)
Re: Google Loon balloon crashes near Yakima
#7Guess that's a hazzard of balloons all over the place. Hope one does not take out a jet.
Balloons are launched all the time, Google's balloons are no different than the many many weather balloons, etc everyday. Their regulations are pretty easy [1] to find and follow. Basically, you call them, let them know when and where it's going up, when and where it's going down, and they'll put out a notice that pilots look at letting them know that there's a balloon out there they should look out for. If it gets l…
Indeed they are launched all the time. But, we are talking about the case that the practice becomes popular and the skies become a dense minefield.
Re: Google Loon balloon crashes near Yakima
#8Guess that's a hazzard of balloons all over the place. Hope one does not take out a jet.
Jet aircraft are a little more manoeuvrable than power lines.
Re: Google Loon balloon crashes near Yakima
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Balloons are launched all the time, Google's balloons are no different than the many many weather balloons, etc everyday. Their regulations are pretty easy [1] to find and follow. Basically, you call them, let them know when and where it's going up, when and where it's going down, and they'll put out a notice that pilots look at letting them know that there's a balloon out there they should look out for. If it gets l…
Indeed they are launched all the time. But, we are talking about the case that the practice becomes popular and the skies become a dense minefield.
The cruising altitude of Google Loon's is well above the cruising altitude of any commercial jet. This accident was caused by a balloon coming down, a much rarer occurrence.
I don't expect to hear a postmortem from Google, but I'd be astonished if this wasn't a malfunction of some sort-- These balloons almost certainly have an emergency cut-down device of some sort capable of safely and rapidly returning the payload to Earth.
Re: Google Loon balloon crashes near Yakima
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Balloons are launched all the time, Google's balloons are no different than the many many weather balloons, etc everyday. Their regulations are pretty easy [1] to find and follow. Basically, you call them, let them know when and where it's going up, when and where it's going down, and they'll put out a notice that pilots look at letting them know that there's a balloon out there they should look out for. If it gets l…
Indeed they are launched all the time. But, we are talking about the case that the practice becomes popular and the skies become a dense minefield.
That's an interesting back of the envelope question to work out. Something with volume occupied by all aircraft aloft at any given moment, volume of all balloons at any given moment, the total volume of the shell in which commercial air traffic takes place.
I think we can safely forget about the chances of spyplanes hitting balloons, the volume of space versus the number of spyplanes would make that a non-issue, even if there were a lot more balloons.
So 35000 feet (11 km give or take) would be a reasonable upper limit. Let's assume the worst and start from 0, you have a shell above the earths surface up to 11 km above it, which has an approximate volume of: 510.1 million km x 11 = 5610 million cubic kilometers.
That's a lot of space. Every cubic kilometer is 10^9 cubic meters, so 5.6x10^18 cubic meters.
I don't know how many aircraft are typically aloft, but let's say it's 20,000 craft and they're all of the very largest variety (say A380, or Boeing dreamliner). They're approximately 60 meters long, and 6 meter in diameter, so that's 1700 cubic meters, let's double that to include the wing volume, so 3400 cubic meters.
We have 20,000 of them, they're all aloft at the same time, so all the planes take up approximately 68,000,000 cubic meters.
Now for the balloons, they're 10 meters in diameter, worst case they are 50 meters high or so (instrument package dangling below the balloon, assuming a cylinder with a radius of 5 meters and a height of 50), so about 4000 cubic meters. ('assume a spherical cow of uniform density').
So how big is the chance that one balloon intersects in all of space with the volume of all the aircraft given that both have all of the atmosphere to play cat and mouse in?
68,000,000 / (5.6x10^18) = 0.000000000012 (the chance that any given cubic meter is part of the space occupied by an aircraft) multiplied by 4000 (the number of cubic meters in a balloon) is about 0.000000048. So that's pretty small but non-zero, multiply by the number of balloons aloft at any given time, but keep in mind that most of the factors here were taken very pessimistic (as in, favouring the collision). The calculation also totally ignores the relative speeds of the two types of vehicles, ascent speed of balloons, the time factor, ability to manoeuvre and so on.
See also:
http://weatherjackwilliams.com/answers-weather-balloons-and-...
edit: extensively edited after avoid3d spotted a crucial error in the math, I had dropped 6 orders of magnitude.