> The system is designed to not pose a risk to human life in the worst case event of a collision. This is what the FAA 101 and ICAO weight limits are for. And indeed, there were no serious injuries and no depressurization event to my knowledge as a result of the collision.
This seems close to a worst case scenario for this failure mode, and everyone is still OK. I consider that good engineering.
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.
Hats off to you and your company. I wish more companies could put up a notice like you did, much less show up as a CEO on frickin' HN and be willing to take responsibility as well as desire to do better. I honestly am a little confused how a person like you exists. The FAA should put someone like you in charge of Boeing.
Please put pressure on the FAA to do better too. NOTAMS, as they currently are, are pretty useless, and allowing unmanned vessels to output ADS-B could be extremely beneficial.
It’s great that you’re taking responsibility at all, but in my opinion, a better system would be not releasing balloons that could impact aircraft in places that aircraft fly.
If that means that either you can’t release balloons or the aircraft can’t fly, then that’s a discussion that we should have about which we value more.
When I buy a ticket to fly on a aircraft, I do not want to know that I’ll probably survive if my plane hits a weather balloon, I want to know that my plane won’t hit a weather balloon.
I understand there are all sorts of inherent risks in aviation, and that if I want to fly, I must accept those risks. But hitting a balloon is not an inherent risk of flying, it’s a risk imposed on by others.
It's unfortunate that this happened, but this will help drive better engineering decisions in the future for everyone. Glad everyone is mostly okay from this!
No, because the plane is designed to safely fly without an engine. They test the engines by shooting turkeys from the grocery store into them while they run.
A reminder to those who presume regulators make the right decisions, a cheap ADSB out transponder would have prevented this incident, but putting one on a weather balloon is prohibited by the FAA.
In hindsight, the fact that it was probably a balloon and not space debris makes a lot of sense. Something falling from space would only spend a few seconds at most in the zone where airplanes cruise but a weather balloon would be there significantly longer. Makes the chance of collisions much higher.
Really depends on how big the space debris was and whether it had slowed to terminal velocity (the speed where the force of gravity equals the force of drag).
I'd rather be in a plane hit by 1 gram piece of space debris than in one that hit a 1kg sandbag hanging from a balloon.
Curious too to learn more about what data, if any, is shared with ATC on the location of these balloons. Airspace is regularly blocked off for rockets and other use, but for many weather balloons the theory is 1) the sky is big, and 2) designs are meant to be that a strike with an aircraft wouldn’t cause significant damage. If this was an impact with a balloon payload then “2” looks problematic.
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.
The birthday paradox seems relevant here as well: With 23 people, your chance of having a "collision" in birthdays is over 50%. With more objects in the sky, the chance of collision is likely greater than one would assume given the space they have to occupy.
Related, i dont know what the technical term for this is, but was thinking about how because of speed, being in two places at once (collision) the equation depends greatly on speed. Simplistically, if planes traveled at the speed of light then an object on ANY point of their trajectory would collide.
Much more complex than simply amount of space times size of objects. Knowing theres a whole science / engineering behind this, Im just so curious about the people and practices that go into this part of travel especially air and space travel.
It is surprising that weather balloons don't have ADS-B out (or did this ballon have that and something about the system didn't work?). If it did work, ADS-B would have made this collision very avoidable.
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).
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.
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.
For a 2.5 lb ground weight balloon, a radar reflector is likely still too heavy. The lightest weight marine radar reflector [1] I could find is about half a pound.
The uAvionix EchoESX [1] claims 4W continuous and with antenna probably adds 400g (0.8lb.)
WindBorne claims "12+ days typical flight, with demonstrated capability for 75+ day missions." So 1150Wh minimum (80Ah at 4S, which is probably like 16lb.) But you're up in the atmosphere and probably need to heat that battery so... more. But we're already at 18lb additional weight... Maybe you could offset with solar panels...
But, given that the entire balloon and payload weighs 2.5lb we're already way off the edge of feasibility for an active ads-b out.
Maybe there's something that would only listen and then respond when it heard something and that would reduce the power draw. But we're needing something 2 orders of magnitude less massive.
About the same as a transponder, I think. According to the FAA many weather balloons operate their transponders (if equipped at all) intermittently to preserve battery.
Readit News
This seems close to a worst case scenario for this failure mode, and everyone is still OK. I consider that good engineering.
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.
If that means that either you can’t release balloons or the aircraft can’t fly, then that’s a discussion that we should have about which we value more.
When I buy a ticket to fly on a aircraft, I do not want to know that I’ll probably survive if my plane hits a weather balloon, I want to know that my plane won’t hit a weather balloon.
I understand there are all sorts of inherent risks in aviation, and that if I want to fly, I must accept those risks. But hitting a balloon is not an inherent risk of flying, it’s a risk imposed on by others.
And yes, this is good engineering, but through decades of learning crowdfunded with tax dollars.
I'd rather be in a plane hit by 1 gram piece of space debris than in one that hit a 1kg sandbag hanging from a balloon.
(399 points, 2 days ago, 222 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45636285
(35 points, 2 days ago, 55 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45633191
Related: It was a weather balloon, not space debris, that struck a United Airlines plane (12 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45652120
Curious too to learn more about what data, if any, is shared with ATC on the location of these balloons. Airspace is regularly blocked off for rockets and other use, but for many weather balloons the theory is 1) the sky is big, and 2) designs are meant to be that a strike with an aircraft wouldn’t cause significant damage. If this was an impact with a balloon payload then “2” looks problematic.
Much more complex than simply amount of space times size of objects. Knowing theres a whole science / engineering behind this, Im just so curious about the people and practices that go into this part of travel especially air and space travel.
At any particular and above a certain flight level maybe.
https://windbornesystems.com/blog/ua-1093
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.
[1] https://www.westmarine.com/plastimo-tubular-radar-reflector-...
WindBorne claims "12+ days typical flight, with demonstrated capability for 75+ day missions." So 1150Wh minimum (80Ah at 4S, which is probably like 16lb.) But you're up in the atmosphere and probably need to heat that battery so... more. But we're already at 18lb additional weight... Maybe you could offset with solar panels...
But, given that the entire balloon and payload weighs 2.5lb we're already way off the edge of feasibility for an active ads-b out.
Maybe there's something that would only listen and then respond when it heard something and that would reduce the power draw. But we're needing something 2 orders of magnitude less massive.
[1] https://uavionix.com/general-aviation/echoesx/