modeless
> 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.
johnldean0
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.
dlcarrier
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.
johnldean0
Yea, the FAA does a lot and I think overall they do a great job, but I wish there was better systems for communications here. I think ultimately companies like WindBorne just have to go above and beyond what is required if they want to operate at scale safely in this space. And no one else operates balloons at the scale that we do, and safety has to be built into the design and operations regardless of how the official systems work.
tyre
Pretty great, public response from you to publish this and be in the comments here. Kudos. I hope more CEOs take your lead.
MPSimmons
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!
thedudeabides5
isn't the worst case it goes into the engine and it explodes/burns?
trenchpilgrim
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.
eirikbakke
Afterwards, they ship the entire engine, with turkey giblets and all, to a lab where the resulting damage is analyzed. Smells awful, according to the engineer I sat next to at a Thanksgiving dinner once...
modeless
Exactly. The plane can land with one engine or even no engines, but it can't land without a pilot in a functioning cockpit.
3D30497420
There's even a whole Wikipedia article on the "chicken gun" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_gun
cbm-vic-20
As god as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly. Through jet engines.
bdangubic
without working one working engine - sure. with serious structural damage - perhaps not so much
dlcarrier
Depressurizations are worse than losing an engine. It can incapacitate the flight crew in seconds.
blackcatsec
A reminder for those in the back, government regulation made this safe (FAA limits).
And yes, this is good engineering, but through decades of learning crowdfunded with tax dollars.
dlcarrier
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.
Someone1234
An ADSB transponder, along with supporting electronics and battery will add to the weight of the aircraft. It makes it safer in one way, and less safe is another. This isn't quite the "slam dunk" you seem to believe.
AnimalMuppet
Prohibited? Why?
Will air travel become safer because we don't know where they are?
artursapek
Anyone arguing against government regulation as a whole is completely delusional. Companies can't be trusted to regulate themselves.
dlcarrier
This event was unsafe, despite being wholly within the regulations, but in the comments of this post, the CEO of the company has made a promise to do better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45656044#45659295
Government regulators have failed, but at least the company is making an effort to prevent this from happening again.
baggy_trough
The problem is we don't have a garbage collection method to get rid of counterproductive or even insane regulations, so they build up into a choking plaque over time.
celeritascelery
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.
throwaway48476
There are thousands of flights every day for decades. There's going to be a collision at some point.
blackcatsec
I mean, it also makes sense considering space debris would have hit that plane with significantly more force than a busted window.
Polizeiposaune
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.
gnabgib
Discussions
(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
TechSquidTV
Huh, I just saw the Scott Manly video where he called out a comment of someone mentioning a weather balloon. Props to that guy.
JCM9
Interesting. The “big sky” theory has its limits.
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.
consp
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.
cloverich
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.
pcthrowaway
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.
pastel8739
Though the birthday paradox is concerned with self-collisions, I think since these are explicitly collisions with other objects it feels less paradoxical to compute
barbazoo
> planes always follow certain patterns
At any particular and above a certain flight level maybe.
thomascountz
OT, but the response from Windborne and its CEO makes me think it would be a great place to work.
thorsson12
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.
bri3d
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).
kawfey
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.
[0] https://www.eoss.org/ Look for N991SS, N992SS, N461SG.
yabones
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.
toast0
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.
[1] https://www.westmarine.com/plastimo-tubular-radar-reflector-...
kawfey
you can make one out of cardboard and aluminum foil (better yet, aluminized mylar (space blanket) on foam) on the order of a few oz. https://www.instructables.com/Lightweight-Radar-Reflector/
A radar reflector such as that, or this (https://overlookhorizon.com/product/radar-reflector/, which is ~300g) has roughly the same RCS as a small (piper cherokee) to medium (gulfstream) sized aircraft.
That being said, detection isn't everything; primary radar cannot make accurate altitude measurements, only bearing and range. While that's enough to route traffic around, it could be also mistaken for a false return.
wat10000
Marine applications care a lot about durability and pretty much zero about weight, so I wouldn’t expect that to be representative of how light they can be. You could make a radar reflector from a bit of cardboard and aluminum foil.
imglorp
Off limits? What's the reason? Why not ADS-B everything in the air and let the computers sort it out?
naberhausj
47 CFR 87.107 requires that radios transmitters in aircraft broadcast an identification number, and the allowed forms of identification aren't permissive enough for non-registered aircraft.
ADS-B out is still relatively new (especially in aviation terms) so I expect we'll see this continue to evolve.
Jtsummers
It's not off limits in the regulatory sense. Balloons are generally exempted due to their size and power constraints. Per the submission, the balloon weighs 2.4 lbs at launch. That doesn't give them much room to add a transponder and battery for ADS-B while staying within the target weight limit.
alistairSH
It's not off-limits. But, it's not required (for most balloons, ULs, etc). And due to cost and/or weight, people don't always use it when it's not mandatory.
nine_k
What are the power requirements of ADS-B? How much more battery would the balloon have to lift?
mattofak
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.
naberhausj
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.
anjel
Google's late great balloon project wasn't about weather but it did regularly show up on ADS-B
Gravityloss
Who would have believed, what was suspected of being a mysterious malevolence coming from outer space, was just a quaint weather balloon all along!
Somehow that rings some faint bell but can't quite put my finger on it...
bombcar
It's probably a decorated bell, some form of art bell ...
BubbleRings
Okay you two… Sugar and Art Bell. I had to get ChatGPT to refresh my memory, but I’m with you now… hovering like a fly, waiting for the windshield on the freeway.
testplzignore
Give me... sugar. More. More.
elAhmo
I wonder how much damage to the society should Musk do before people stop posting links to Twitter.
whycome
Do you stop using American products when you don't agree with the ones running it?
ikamm
I don't know why you would expect a forum of wannabe tech startup founders to turn on Elon Musk, many people here still idolize him.
dlcarrier
> We have been coordinating with the FAA for the entire history of the company and file NOTAMs (aviation alerts) for every balloon we launch.
At this point, I'm pretty confident that NOTAMs exist as a way relegate all liability to pilots. Really it's 14 CFR 91.103, which opens with "Each pilot in command shall, before beginning a flight, become familiar with all available information concerning that flight", that allows NOTAMS to transfer liability.
Theoretically CFRs are limited to powers specifically authorized by congress, but in practice, they are full of overreach that is only limited when it becomes case law, but the FAA is so powerful that it can effectively shut down any organization trying to dispute them in federal courts, so there isn't really any case law limiting the scope of their CFRs.
imglorp
NOTAM system is archaic and basically useless for this kind of thing. It's a blob of text which will not be specific, memorable, and actionable for an airline pilot, who is on their jetway at FL036 -- an altitude and speed where "see and avoid" doesn't really apply for a bunch of reasons -- and depending on ATC to route them around hazards.
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/31058/are-weath...
There REALLY needs to be a unified ATC system that incorporates NOTAMS, traffic, and live position of whatever unmanned stuff is moving around. We have most of the tech deployed already. We have to integrate it.
CEO Tweet: https://twitter.com/johndeanl/status/1980462264974209292