Google's Project Loon

[Dee Vee]

Maybe these are common elsewhere, but I've never seen one on FR24, let alone over Australia!

https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/1072x822/tfx8v7t_2462126ff282c1207ebd33f482c453e3d7b7c24b.jpg

[Deejaypee]

I have seen these around occasionally over the past few years!

[Godknows]

Hello Dee Vee,
Yes they have been around at various locations in oz for a few years, from memory Google are testing this technology to provide internet to third world countries.

Rather apt they are in Australia (mostly due to our uncluttered upper airspace) considering this Governments utter balls up with the NBN!

[flying-spike]

I saw two on FR24 within about 30 miles of each other over the NT about a week ago

[greybeard]

Hi ball or similar were in Australia in the 80s, I actually saw one between Mt Isa and Alice Springs from our aircraft.

[LeadSled]

------- considering this Governments utter balls up with the NBN!
Folks,
Sorry for the thread drift, but I must comment ----- in recent times I have heard Labor roundly criticising the present Government over the NBN, and in the same breath praising the UK rollout.
As a matter of interest, the "technology" mix is the same in both countries ---- a mix of FTTH, FTTP, HFC and copper ----- depending on what makes most engineering economic sense. If Godknows means it should have been the Labor "fibre for all", that was never realistic, either in cost or timeframe. Repeat bollocks often enough, and it becomes conventional wisdom.
The original Labor steering committee has ONE SINGLE person on it who knew something about such matters ----- the rest, chaired by Ken Henry (now of Banking Royal Commission fame) did not have a skerrick of practical knowledge about such matters.
How do I know ---- that one person, who had actually built networks, was a good friend of mine, (and a well known aviator) and a close friend of the then Minister, Stephen Conroy, but he couldn't convince Conroy that 100% fibre (excluding space served remote areas) was not possible, let alone practical, except in really high density areas. All the non-technical public servants, accountants and barrow pushers knew better.
Don't confuse the capabilities of the system with what some retailers have been doing, or the complaints from those who only bought low speed plans. As for those needing 100 and up, a very small market, but mostly there for any who need it.
Tootle pip!!

[Godknows]

Hello LedSled,
Thank you for your post and providing your opinion on the NBN, I could of course serve the ball back to your court based on my experiences as a long time consumer (of seeking fast internet) and talking to many engineers crying in their beer about the state of the NBN through political (and one ex-Australian citizen-and-now-a-US citizen-who-will-not-be-named influence) interference in this seemingly extremely important 'nation building' infrastructure project - think 'fast-cheaper' etc etc.

However I did post that my comment about the NBN to invite comment and comment i did receive - thank you. However I must to settle with agreeing with you to to disagree. And i suspect that the Mods may well decide that this is not an aviation matter, more a matter for Whirlpool!

A quick question, why do we still have carburetors in GA? can anyone tell me why in 2019!!

[KRviator]

Because you'll never convince a CAR21M engineer that you can have a safe, reliable, independent, dual EFII system on a certified bugsmasher for under $10,000 installed and all those experimental guys are flying on borrowed time with their systems...

[compressor stall]

Back to the Loon - was that what landed near ti-tree (NW of Alice) early on Sat evening?

Mulitole hazard alerts on Area as “a high altitude balloon” descended to impact.

[LeadSled]

Godknows,
My contribution was not "opinion", it was a statement of fact.
Tootle pip!!

[Derfred]

I find Loon interesting because Australia’s NBN for bush dwellers zoned for Satellite is woeful for anyone who actually wants to use it for more than email.

NBN satellite has good speed, total coverage, and reasonable pricing, but the bit that bites is the maximum monthly 90GB peak limit. You aren’t even allowed to pay more for more if you want to, and there is no indication it will increase.

Maybe it’s simply the bandwidth limit of the satellites. But it’s annoying to note that a local airline can get terrabytes/day from the same satellite just to serve unlimited Netflix to it’s customers.

Loon could provide competition for NBN satellite - if indeed it is more than a pipe dream, and would consider deploying in this country (I know that’s not it’s stated business plan).

From a technical point of view, it is completely beyond my comprehension that they consider maintaining a fleet of balloons floating above a location with the endless vagaries of winds and weather even a possibility worth investigating.

Seems fanciful to me, but they’ve been testing for quite a while now and haven’t been put off yet, so either Google is onto something or they have more money than sense.

Is it timely to remind ourselves that in 2015 it was promoted widely that a Google driverless car would be available at a dealer near you by 2020? I’ve got my deposit ready... 270 more sleeps!

[Slippery_Pete]

Give it a break Leaddie.

The “multi-mix technology” is a huge basket case. It was meant to save money, all it has done has given us a handicapped, inconsistent system with no longevity - and it’s turned out to be just as expensive. In ten years time we’ll be back at square one.

One of the first steps was to purchase the Optus cable infrastructure for hundreds of millions of dollars to use. They bought it, then discovered it was completely incapable of doing the job - so they scrapped it. Hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ money wasted buying a piece of sh**. Optus laughing all the way to the bank.

FTTP nationwide was the right solution. The cheapest/fastest option always costs the most in the long term.

Pay peanuts, get monkeys.

[Snakecharma]

Slippery Pete, funny you should say that.

we are on the Optus HFC cable and we get 100mbs reliably. The nbn guys installed the prewiring to our house and said “you will love the nbn! The speeds will be great! You should get up to 50mbs!” I said “oh god I hope not!” “Why he says?” ”I get 100mbs at the moment”..”oh you won’t get close to that” he says.

so while the popular opinion is that the Optus Hfc system is crap and a dud buy, it is delivering, reliably, double what nbn promise, so it can’t be too much of a dud.

[Horatio Leafblower]

Leadsled I have a terrible feeling I know who you mean by your aviating internet expert. Is that the chap who did time for fraud?

I am in the UK and the internet ain't THAT good here (although I am getting 37 MB/sec download and 9.7 upload in Bath at the moment) but far better than regional Australia.

Slippery Pete has it right.

As for in 2015 it was promoted widely that a Google driverless car would be available at a dealer near you by 2020? my hire car got upgrded to a Volvo C90 and its autopilot steers within lanes, accelerates, decelerates, maintains distance from the car in front, and navigates itself. I feel the difference between this and driverless is more in the software than the vehicle capability.

[GWYN]

Back to Project Loon, for some years they have been evident on FR24, in South America's remote regions, with the callsign HBAL**. Mostly over Venezuela, Brazil (Amazonas), Ecuador and Peru. The operate at around FL600. I have no idea of the quality / speed of internet.

[LeadSled]

Leadsled I have a terrible feeling I know who you mean by your aviating internet expert. Is that the chap who did time for fraud?
Slippery Pete has it right.
.
Horation,
Certainly NOT.
Quite apart from his engineering qualifications and network experience, and his heading up a major player in the telephone business in Australia, he was an industrial advocate, FAIM and FAID in good standing, and interestingly, as will as aviation qualifications in AU and US, he had an ocean going master mariner's certificate, that he kept current.

As for your or slippery Pete's opinions, that is all they are opinions. Reread my original post, it was a list of facts, I offered no opinion.
Tootle pip!!

[Derfred]

As for my hire car got upgrded to a Volvo C90 and its autopilot steers within lanes, accelerates, decelerates, maintains distance from the car in front, and navigates itself. I feel the difference between this and driverless is more in the software than the vehicle capability.

According to Google, any step up from this is the most dangerous combination of driver/automation possible. Some even argue that this is approaching a step too-far. You can’t incrementally increase automation from here. You either go fully autonomous, or stay where we are.

And I agree.

Just enough automation to make you think it’s doing ok, you can relax, take your hands off the wheel, feet off the pedals, drink coffee, send texts, watch Netflix, but all the while you are still the driver in charge. If you hit someone, it’s still your fault.

That is actually a very close parallel to the current level of automation in modern airline cockpits.

So why is that bad?

It’s really bad for these reasons:

Aircraft: The pilot has gone through extensive training to use automation to relieve workload, but knows it must be monitored at all times and be ready and trained to take over and fly manually at any moment. He has to be licenced and tested to achieve this with medical standards and countless hours of regular retraining and assessment. These assessments will dedicate training time to his ability to recover the situation in the event the automation fails. He also has to demonstrate the attitude and discipline to achieve this challenging goal of man vs machine, day in, day out. Only a certain percentage of the population will ever have what it takes to accomplish this.

Cars: Drivers of a car with similar automation levels will never have anything like an order of magnitude of those standards, understanding, discipline, or training. It just can’t work.

And to top it off, a pilot considers it “a very close call” if he comes within maybe 30 seconds of a collision. And for most of his day, he remains at least several minutes away from any potential collision. A driver in a car with passing opposite direction traffic is literally 2 seconds from disaster the entire time. Any abnormalities that occur outside of the scope of the “partial automation” will provide little chance for the distracted, untrained driver to take over and save the day. From that principle alone, risk analysis would dictate that pilotless airliners should in theory exist long before anyone puts their trust in a driverless car.

Your average semi-autonomous Volvo driver has no training, no standards, no medical requirements, no human factors training, no discipline, has screaming kids in the back, is half asleep, possibly pissed, and probably watching Netflix. And his 18yo son earned his “L” plates sitting in the driver seat for 120 hours without touching the wheel or pedals while filming himself on Instagram. How’s he supposed to takeover when the partial-automation fails? He doesn’t care because he’s preoccupied by the fact that his Instagram won’t upload because this is Australia, NBN sucks and Project Loon hasn’t launched here yet. This is how politicians confuse us. Give a 15 minute soliloquy about what they want to say and then in the last sentence mention the topic at hand so they can “stay on thread” ;)

Google is right, semi-autonomous will never work in cars. It works in aircraft, but without aviation-level discipline, it can never work in cars. All or nothing.

A bit of extra technology thrown in such as radar autonomous braking is great. That’s just a manoeuvring characteristics augmention system, nothing wrong with that, just a software improvement to a proven safe design - in fact, odds are it should never even activate.

But the minute drivers think they can take their hands off the wheel and watch Netflix, ****’s gonna get real.

Fully autonomous or not at all.

And we’ve a long road ahead for fully autonomous. I might get slightly more interested when they can build a vacuum cleaner that doesn’t do this (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/15/roomba-robot-vacuum-poopocalypse-facebook-post).

Go Loon!

[harrryw]

I am now living in Thailand....I never had internet like I get here in Australia and probably never will.A fraction of the price too. If a "Newly developing country" can do it I cannot understand why Australia cannot.

[Ascend Charlie]

The tyranny of distance.

When I moved to a newly-built suburb in 2007, where the power, telephone and services are underground, I mistakenly hoped that there would be cables also for the cable TV.

Bong. Wrong.

For Pay TV, it is a dish on the roof.
When I went to T3lstr@ to get the landline connected, I was told that ADSL internet was not available over the new wires - too far from some base station. Some dial-up was available, so I used that until eventually got ADSL 1. Dismal speeds, poor service with dropouts on a regular basis.

Fast forward 10 years, still on ADSL 1. Then along comes NBN and tells me of their wondrous abilities - but they still use the same crappy copper wires to the hub as I was on before. And there is a distance limit of 800m, at which it pretty much can't push through the copper. I live around 700m from the nearest hub. The service will still be rubbish.

So, I cancelled my landline, work only off mobile phones, and for internet I get a signal radiated from my neighbour, who has a dish pointing at the base a few km away, and there it goes straight into the fibre. I pay for 45 down and 5 up, and usually get 60 to 80 down and 50 up.

[tail wheel]

I live in the heart of an Australian City. I get 6.5 Mbps down and 0.8 Mbps up. No mobile signal in the house, I take mobile phone calls in the street outside.

And that last century standard service costs me far more than the cost feeding our flock of pidgeons we use for urgent communications..... :mad:

[billo123]

What I can't understand is, why is TELSTRa not utilising this technology to actually save cash and boost their internet network so we can all experience the type of speed every third world country is getting. Too little brains and too much cost.

[LostProperty]

I read about project Loon some years ago and I don't think the intention was ever to "base" the balloons over particular locations. Rather I think the idea, fanciful as it may seem, is to have large numbers of these things continually floating around at high altitude on the prevailing winds and each beaming broadband onto what would be a fairly large area of the earth from those altitudes. I guess they use solar power and get the broadband connections beamed up from terrestrial stations or perhaps even satellites. They are obviously also equipped with ADS-B since we can see at least some of them on internet flight trackers but I'd be interested to know if anyone, in deepest Africa for instance, is actually getting broadband from them. Who knows what other tricks might be up there?

[Capt Fathom]

13 Balloons out today over WA, NT and QLD.

[WingNut60]

I am now living in Thailand....I never had internet like I get here in Australia and probably never will.A fraction of the price too. If a "Newly developing country" can do it I cannot understand why Australia cannot.

You're right.
I had high-speed fibre to my house in Balikpapan from 2013, excellent performance.
AUD approx. $50 / month including comprehensive international cable TV.

That's a small / medium sized city in the jungle in Borneo with a relatively small market for Internet accounts.
But then, there were very few dead spots for cell coverage either, anywhere in Kalimantan where there is a road. A few 5 minute gaps through some of the hillier, jungle areas.

Western Australia you lose your cell connection as soon as you hit the top of the Darling Scarp and only pick it up again if you're within line-of-sight to one of the infrequent country area towers.

[WingNut60]

The tyranny of distance.

When I moved to a newly-built suburb in 2007, where the power, telephone and services are underground, I mistakenly hoped that there would be cables also for the cable TV.

Not sure what distance you're talking about, but 20 km will have you outside cell coverage in Perth; and I don't mean just dead spots.

And the truly criminal thing, is that for new suburbs in the Perth Metropolitan area, they're still putting in copper.

[jimjim1]

There usually seem to be some Loons over South America, sometimes Puerto Rico area and there are about 14 over Australia (north and north west) right now. On FR24, set an altitude filter to say 45,500-MAX ft and they stand out clearly. At present MAX seems to be about 65,000 and perhaps these balloons may sometimes be above that.

Here is a launch facility in USA. https://goo.gl/maps/VYjibCuN9f32



https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/996x718/australian_loons_091b93aba3e412b7d0c943420288b63aa12724b5.pn g

[CaptainMidnight]

At present MAX seems to be about 65,000 and perhaps these balloons may sometimes be above that.
Last I heard from Airservices the letter of agreement with Google stated Loons would operate almost always above FL600 i.e. above CTA, and only descend below that under strict conditions, with notification to ATC.

It may be resolved now, but a couple of years ago the altitude information the Loons were generating via SSR and ADS-B wasn't pressure-altitude based. Instead it was height above terrain, based on the current GPS position referenced to an internal topographic database, which wasn't any use to ATC for separation.

[Derfred]

How the hell are their transponders certified then?

[CaptainMidnight]

How the hell are their transponders certified then?
That's a question for the FAA.

[atakacs]

Last I heard from Airservices the letter of agreement with Google stated Loons would operate almost always above FL600 i.e. above CTA, and only descend below that under strict conditions, with notification to ATC.

Would seem those guys did not want to take a chance...

https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/900x2000/baloon_d4aaf0b29d9ac79a63074fb490c8b9746a5fa44d.jpg
loon out of Africa

[faction]

https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/922x1048/screen_shot_2020_06_11_at_2_30_15_am_1178c1c65c9f3fe3181f746 9199d2cbfdddb9ff6.png
I found one in the wild a few weeks ago, they're fitted with strobes.