sovereignty is a destabilizing action that must be addressed, and President Biden cannot be silent,” Speaker McCarthy said via Twitter. It is an open question whether bringing the balloon down would have posed a danger on the ground in sparsely populated Montana.Īn electronics engineer and colonel in the Hellenic Air Force, Konstantinos Zikidis, told the Sun, “In case of falling debris, it would not go unnoticed however no significant harm should be expected.”Ī Pentagon spokesman, Patrick Ryder, said that the America-Canada Aerospace Defense Command, known as Norad, is closely monitoring the balloon’s continued trajectory, which could now be over Canadian airspace. “We have very high confidence that the balloon belongs to China,” the senior defense official told reporters. Austin and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley, advised against taking “kinetic action.” When he was informed of the intrusion, President Biden reportedly asked Secretary Austin to present him with the best options.Ī senior defense official said that America scrambled fighter jets, including F-22s, to shoot down the balloon if ordered, but that the decision was made not to shoot because of the potential danger to people on the ground from the debris, a senior defense department official told reporters. An anonymous defense official told the AP that commercial pilots could spot the immense spy balloon from their cockpit According to various press and eyewitness reports, the length of the large white balloon approximated that of three school buses. On Thursday the Pentagon announced that it was tracking a Chinese spy balloon flying at a high altitude over American territory, passing over sensitive military installations. The Billings Gazette reported on Thursday that the ground stop covered a 50-mile radius that included the Billings airport and was announced through the Automatic Terminal Information Service, a broadcast system used to communicate vital information to pilots, airports, and air traffic controllers. It is not every day that an American airport issues a ground stop due to a Chinese spy balloon hovering overhead, but that appears to be the reason why the FAA closed airspace for two hours over the airport at Billings, Montana, on Wednesday.
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