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Balloon on Flightaware


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Well, this is a first for me.  Floating across Texas is a Balloon being tracked on Flightaware.  It shows it doing a whopping 15 mph at 58,300 feet!!!!

https://flightaware.com/live/flight/HBAL218

This is the company flying this balloon.

https://loon.com/

From their website:

Loon is a network of balloons traveling on the edge of space, delivering connectivity to people in unserved and underserved communities around the world.

 

Balloon on flightaware.jpg

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I was going to post this last night but fell asleep.  I saw something last night while letting my dogs out very high up with anti-collision lights and figuring it was a G650 but it was moving incredibly slow. I looked at Flightradar24 to see what it was and saw HBAL213 at 57.5k feet. It was over western Chicago burbs.  It looks like it is over Saginaw, MI now. 

0D4B05A0-374E-424E-B69C-08A1CDC068DC.png

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12 minutes ago, aviatoreb said:

Neat - and at FL60 there would no longer be any tracking on FlightAware I presume since it is no longer controlled airspace up there.  I bet there are lots of balloons up there at any time.

There was a reddit post 2 nights ago that someone identified 33 Loon balloons floating around the world.  Supposedly they are all transmitting ADSB 

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2 hours ago, MooneyMitch said:

Loon.com appears to be in the same business as SpaceX Starlink.

Very interesting. 

I was gonna say, these are Google balloons (loon.com is an alphabet company, i.e., part of Google), and they've been showing up on flightradar24 for a long time, they're just not always noticed.   They're quite large at altitude, and if it is a clear day and one is down-sun from you, it's not unusual to be able to see them from the ground with the naked eye.   I've seen a few of them just by knowing where to look in the right conditions.

They do a pretty good job of navigating them, changing altitude to exploit the winds to put them where they want them.   It's been interesting to see where they launch them and where they go.

 

Edited by EricJ
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Mr. Gorbechov.... Tear down this wall....

About a three minute speech from Mr. Reagan... available on YouTube.

 

more about the wall...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_Gate

 

Staying on topic... there were many people attempting to cross over that wall using balloons...
 

We have come so far...

still have a ways to go...

:)

Best regards,

-a-

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10 minutes ago, carusoam said:

Mr. Gorbechov.... Tear down this wall....

About a three minute speech from Mr. Reagan... available on YouTube.

 

more about the wall...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_Gate

 

Staying on topic... there were many people attempting to cross over that wall using balloons...
 

We have come so far...

still have a ways to go...

:)

Best regards,

-a-

I saw the remnant of that wall about 3 or 4 years ago during a different trip to Berlin.  There was not a lot of wall left at that point, but quite a poignant structure for the history the lead up to the point where I was standing in front of a little remnant of that wall.  And of course I remember Ronald Regan's speech.

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On 7/9/2020 at 12:23 PM, aviatoreb said:

Funny - that's the guy that came up first on my google search and I liked his t-shirt so that's what I posted.

Good friend of mine was the keyboard player for the Aquabats, lives fairly close by. 

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On 7/9/2020 at 6:49 PM, Hank said:

Naaah, much prefer her black pants!

Gabriele Kerner aka Nena is still singing, and is a grandmother of teenagers now.

The zenith of her professional career was the release of 99 Luftballons which, in slangy lyrics refer to the NATO vs Warsaw Pact nuclear standoff.  Ancient history now. 

When 99 Luftballons aired, my first Mooney was already 20 years old.  It’s still flying around. 

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