WindBorne cofounder CEO (John Dean) here -- Thanks, indeed I think that a strike to the cockpit glass, in the corner where there is more stress concentration, is one of the worst places to hit for human safety. And indeed the system was designed to be safe in the event of a collision.

But still, in light of this I think we can do better. I think it's possible to operate the way we do and have a the mass distributed such that the only damage is ever cosmetic. We follow FAA 101 regulations on this but I want to have better internal impact modeling as well.

isn't the worst case it goes into the engine and it explodes/burns?

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.

There are thousands of flights every day for decades. There's going to be a collision at some point.

I mean, it also makes sense considering space debris would have hit that plane with significantly more force than a busted window.

Isn't this pure statistics? The big sky isn't as big since planes always follow certain patterns and so do weather balloons (because wind also has patterns). Now someone needs to do some black magic with that model and calculate the arrival time distribution of accidents and you get to see if this is an outlier or not.

ADS-B, as regulated, is a terrible solution for this stuff. EIRP requirements make it extremely impractical as a transmission solution for small devices, most ADS-B In equipment isn't designed to correctly alert for separation with non-fixed wing devices, and (due in no small part to the very high EIRP), there are concerns about both air-time saturation and management plane saturation (ie - ADS-B In equipment also wasn't designed to track very many entities).

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.

Some do. Edge of Space Sciences (EOSS) is group of citizen high altitude scientists, and their large balloon flights include certified ADS-B transponders [0] and radar corner reflectors. They also file their flights with the FAA to publish NOTAMS. They have significantly larger payloads than this, but are designed to quickly ascend to ~100kft and pop reducing the loiter time in congested airspace.

Project Loon balloons also show up on Flightaware, so they either have ADS-B or TIS-B.

A situation like this will almost certainly cause some congresspeople to fret and write bills that would require ADS-B on all balloons, which would be a death knell for amateur ballooning unless ADS-B (or "legacy" Mode A/C/S) transponders become significantly smaller and more affordable. Mode C/S transponders are already available in miniaturized form factors thanks to the UAS industry, and are designed to be interrogated by aircraft equipped with TCAS (i.e. all 10+ passenger aircraft) that provides pilots deconfliction commands automatically and with no ATC support. But they're still priced for industry, not amateurs.

[0] https://www.eoss.org/ Look for N991SS, N992SS, N461SG.

What are the power requirements of ADS-B? How much more battery would the balloon have to lift?

Google's late great balloon project wasn't about weather but it did regularly show up on ADS-B

It's probably a decorated bell, some form of art bell ...

Okay you two… Sugar and Art Bell. I had to get ChatGPT to refresh my memory, but I’m with you now… hovering like a fly, waiting for the windshield on the freeway.

Give me... sugar. More. More.

NOTAM system is archaic and basically useless for this kind of thing. It's a blob of text which will not be specific, memorable, and actionable for an airline pilot, who is on their jetway at FL036 -- an altitude and speed where "see and avoid" doesn't really apply for a bunch of reasons -- and depending on ATC to route them around hazards.

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/31058/are-weath...

There REALLY needs to be a unified ATC system that incorporates NOTAMS, traffic, and live position of whatever unmanned stuff is moving around. We have most of the tech deployed already. We have to integrate it.

Do you stop using American products when you don't agree with the ones running it?

I don't know why you would expect a forum of wannabe tech startup founders to turn on Elon Musk, many people here still idolize him.

The balloon has a sand ballast that it can release sand from to descend.

I believe it was night out, so you wouldn't really have any light to illuminate it externally.

At normal cruise, a B737 is travelling at 700 feet/second. You're not going to have much time to do anything but go, "oh, fuck!"

The actual part they impacted seems rather small. It’s basically a 2lb sandbag with a solar panel stuck to it.

Fighters can pick up balloons like this on radar, and you can see them in targeting pods (e.g. cued from the radar). You can see them with eyes if you get close, but it's not a guarantee.

It's very hard to make it go to a specific place of the actor's choice.

There were attempts to use balloons as long range weapons in WW2 but they weren't very effective.

Bad actors have a lot of ways to cause damage, most of them much more effective than balloons.

LOL