I had a work-study job in college at our small local airport working for the FAA. I mostly clipped new FAA communications into 3-ring binders and tore off expired ticker tape weather reports for a couple of hours a day.
My boss was old school government employee, straight and square. One day we were talking and he handed me a FAA business card with a UFO reporting 800 phone number. Odd I thought, and put it in my wallet.
Years later I lost my wallet in a phone booth (am old). I got a call from someone who found my wallet and wanted to return it. He came over with the wallet which had everything still in it, including cash. The only thing missing was the UFO card. I've never seen another one.
I heard that each missile costs upward of $6 million. As in millions of tax dollars are being funneled to private corporations with every event.
Technically….
The whole F22 program has cost $100bn and only been used to shoot down balloons!
Couldn't the military just employ some older FLAK gun or something? I mean I know they don't exactly keep those on hand anymore, but it would seem perfectly suitable for the job without being nearly as costly. Especially if this ever became a regular thing.
Depends on the kind of flak gun, but you're probably right about the height being out of range there. i didn't realize they were floating the things over from that high up.
And yeah, likely safer to use missiles in that situation, especially since I'm not even sure how reliable those guns are at that kind of altitude.
It's actually a really curious military scenario too. Using reasonably old-school tech that probably outranges a lot of ground to air weapons, outranges drones, can be totally unmanned, and costs so little to produce and deploy.
As Ernsithe says, flak doesn't have the range. The bigger surface-to-air missiles like Patriots and S-300s probably do, though: that's what did in the other attempts at designing bombers and spyplanes that fly above the effective ceiling of the enemy's air defenses.
Aye. I did a quick search to verify the ranges and more or less confirmed what he said. Didn't check to see what specific G2A missiles would have the range, but given the numbers I saw, it seemed like it would've been specific to a certain class of ground to air missiles.
Being aware of some of these details now, I'm feeling like a lot of RTS games really screwed the pooch on how they usually balanced things. (IE, Red Alert. Poor MIGs)
They should have just used a big mirror + magnifying glass to pop the balloon