A high-tech US army airship broke free from its mooring on Wednesday, wreaking havoc as it floated from Maryland to Pennsylvania, dragging its 10,000 foot long cable behind it and knocking out power to thousands.
The US military scrambled two armed F16 fighter jets to keep watch as the blimp traveled into civilian airspace after coming loose shortly after mid-day from its mooring station at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, a US army facility 40 miles north-east of Baltimore.
It came down several hours later in two parts in Montour County, Pennsylvania, the US military’s North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad) told reporters.
First, the tail portion of the blimp detached and came to the ground “with no reports of other damage or casualties”, navy captain Scott Miller said. The remainder of the blimp also grounded itself.
The balloon’s tether hit power lines and caused outages near Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. As it hovered over Pennsylvania, police warned residents to contact the police if they spotted the airship.
PPL Electric Utilities Corp said that as of 3.45pm there were about 17,800 customers without power in Columbia County, Pennsylvania, with another 9,000 out in Schuylkill County.
It was not immediately clear how the blimp – which is known as JLENS, short for: Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System – became detached from its mooring station at Aberdeen Proving Grounds.
The office of Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf released a statement to let the public know the state was monitoring the situation and discussing it with federal officials, state police and emergency officials and the national guard.
The blimp is described by manufacturer Raytheon as a “cruise-missile fighting radar blimp”.
The US army deployed the JLENS system earlier this year at Maryland’s Aberdeen Proving Grounds to identify threats in the north-east. It consists of two blimps which fly up to 10,000 feet in the air.
While the system is meant to detect suspicious activity in the air near Washington DC and New York City, the system failed to identify a Florida mailman who flew a gyrocopter onto Capitol Hill earlier this year.
As of December 2014, the government had spent $2.8bn on the system and had approved another $43.3m to test the system.
Lee Fang, an investigative reporter at The Intercept, noted that Raytheon on Tuesday posted a job opening for someone to watch the airship.
Two JLens balloons broke from their moorings in Iraq in 2006, according to WikiLeaks’ Iraq war logs. Both balloons were thought to have drifted towards Iran, but their final destination remains unclear.
No comments:
Post a Comment