“Down that balloon!” As a man of action, former President Donald Trump gave his opinion on Friday on the best way to put an end to the Chinese aircraft which was flying over United States territory. A radical solution which was reminiscent of that which the former American president had suggested in 2019, during the fire of Notre-Dame de Paris: send Canadair to, quite simply, drop tons of water on the building on fire.
The idea, however, was much less absurd, and the Pentagon had indeed examined from the start the possibility of shooting down the balloon – another has since been identified in South America – at the request of President Joe Biden. Fighter jets had even approached the craft over Montana, according to a senior US defense official. But the decision had been made to do nothing. This Saturday evening, it is however this scenario worthy of a disaster film which was retained. On the images broadcast by American television, we could thus see the balloon falling vertically after being shot down by the American army.
Why did it take so long to finally make the decision to shoot? First and foremost, for safety reasons of the inhabitants of the areas overflown by the balloon. “We considered that it was large enough for the debris to cause damage” if it had been shot down in a populated area, indicated the same senior Defense official. Contacted by Le Parisien, David Stupples, professor of electronic engineering at the City University of London and specialist in military intelligence and electronic warfare, did not say anything else. “The ball is too big. If you shoot it down, you can’t really know where it will land because it will float and drift with the wind, he explained. Imagine if it goes down a highway! “And to conclude:” If it does not cause any problem, then why not let it float? »
In fact, the American authorities considered that the balloon, even if it was able to record sensitive data, was not dangerous in itself. “The balloon is currently flying at an altitude well above commercial air traffic. It poses no military or physical threat to people on the ground,” Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder said, noting that the United States and Canadian Aerospace Defense Command (Norad) was monitoring the trajectory of the plane. ball.
An expected shooting window
Added to this were questions about the effectiveness of such a maneuver. William Kim, specialist in surveillance balloons at the Marathon Initiative think tank in Washington, quoted by AFP, warned for example of the difficulty of the maneuver. “These balloons run on helium (…) You can’t just shoot them and set them on fire” like an airship, explained the specialist. “These are not things that explode or burst,” he continued. If you puncture it, it will just deflate very slowly. »
In 1998, the Canadian Air Force had sent an F-18 fighter plane to try to shoot down a weather balloon considered rogue. “They riddled it with a thousand rounds of 20 millimeter ammunition,” recalls William Kim. And it still took six days before he came back down. »
All that was left for the Americans… was to wait. Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder said Friday that the balloon should remain above US territory for “a few more days”. The craft was then heading east, having been located on Friday afternoon “over the central United States” at an altitude of some 18,000 m.
This Saturday evening, the long-awaited shooting window appeared. After air traffic was suspended at three airports in the southeastern United States as a “national security” measure, the US military was able to shoot down the Chinese balloon over the Atlantic Ocean, far from any habitation. It remains to be seen, now, when the aircraft will touch the ground, or the surface of the water.