There’s a balloon floating around in the Central Valley! Not your typical balloon…it’s a Project Loon communications balloon, flying at 56,000′ over Merced. Project Loon is a remote communications project that uses high-altitude balloons to carry cellular service up to the stratosphere in order to provide communications to areas that don’t have service, or during emergencies where terrestrial comms are down.
I noticed it this morning on ForeFlight (pilot app for iPad) as an “aircraft” that was not moving but at 10 miles up in the air. Thought it was a bug until I looked up it’s callsign (it has ADS-B onboard so the public can track it too). Pretty frickin’ awesome!
You can find more information about Project Loon and it’s mission and balloons here.
