“The wayward JLENS aerostat, which left a trail of power outages caused by the 6,000 feet of cable it dragged for over 160 miles on Wednesday, was hit by a barrage of shotgun fire to remove its remaining helium. The military has labeled the incident as a Class A mishap, an aviation accident classification for events that took no human life but caused over $2 million in property damage or caused injury. The incident throws yet another shadow on the JLENS program, which has thus far cost over $2 billion. Raytheon had been marketing the aerostats to the government for use in border monitoring.”
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/runaway-jlens-balloon-shot-100-times-by-pennsylvania-police/
The blimp is part of a program called Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System (JLENS). Billed as “the future of defense” by military contractor Raytheon, the 17-year-old JLENS project has become a costly and ineffective “zombie” program, which has proven impossible to kill because of intense lobbying, an LA Times investigation found:
A 2012 report by the Pentagon’s Operational Test and Evaluation office faulted the system in four “critical performance areas” and rated its reliability as “poor.” A year later, in its most recent assessment, the agency again cited serious deficiencies and said JLENS had “low system reliability.”
Each JLENS blimp costs about $182 million, and the entire project has a pricetag of about $2.7 billion.
It’s not clear how authorities managed to bring the blimp—which normally operates at an altitude of 10,000 feet—to ground. As the Baltimore Sun reported, Raytheon says on its website (pdf) that “in the unlikely event” one of the aircraft comes unmoored, “there are a number of procedures and systems in place which are designed to bring the aerostat down in a safe manner.”
The system consists of two blimps stationed in Maryland—technically aerostats, since they are (or were) tethered and have no propulsion—that use sophisticated radar to monitor the skies all the way from Canada to North Carolina.
JLENS has been hampered by cost overruns and failures, such as its inability to detect a man who landed his ultralight gyrocopter on the US Capitol grounds.
http://qz.com/535762/the-us-military-is-chasing-a-runaway-blimp-over-pennsylvania-and-its-a-boondoggle-that-has-already-wasted-billions-of-dollars/
