Our Balloon Blew Away!!!

I may have mentioned before about the blimp. Technically it’s a tethered aerostat that carries an optical sensor suite up to a couple thousand feet or so and provides a pretty good view of the area. I am sure anything else about it must be classified, but suffice to say that we all feel safer when it’s up. Because the sensors are mounted in a gimbal mechanism that hangs below the balloon we like to refer to it as our sack and ball.

Occasionally we’d bring the thing down and it would be full of bullet holes, but after a quick patch job it would be back up. Well, we had a pretty serious wind storm the other day and we lost the blimp. Literally, it just blew away and there was nothing the ground crew could do. They found the thing near Taji several days later, and I am told it will be back in a couple of days or a week.