Chinese Spy Balloon loitering over continental US
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Again if I remember correctly from my discussions with the F-22 demo pilot in KOSH there are no guns on an F-22, but it can carry an underwing pod holding a large 20mm one. Not sure if a on high altitude intecept mission it would carry an underwing pod. Nevertheless the Pentagon said the F-22 used a "a single AIM-9X supersonic, heat-seeking, air-to-air missile" , the "heat seeking part" is somewhat ironinc here , and the supersoninc probably overdone too, but they got the job done at the exact location they wanted to , so congrats. If they missed and it was outisde the 22 Km sovereingn airspace limit it would have been shooting down an aircraft in international airspace, a totally different ball game politically....
A gun would only make pinprick holes in such a balloon that would have little effect on it for many hours if not days. It certainly wouldn't be possible to 'burst' it with a gun.
Quite how an IR homing missile manages to 'see' the cold-soaked payload is strange, or does that version of Sidewinder have radar homing too? In any case it'll make sure there's nothing left to examine which sounds thoroughly counter-productive.
Maybe they just aren't that bothered to find out what it was carrying, which suggests either they know already or son't consider it a credible threat to anyone (other than the miniscule possibility of it doing any damage falling to ground over the vast, empty midwest).
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In any case it'll make sure there's nothing left to examine which sounds thoroughly counter-productive.
If it was collecting data for eventual retrieval by the owner, the owner can come and search for it.
The 9X (and some other modern heaters) uses some fancy technology to image the target in the IR (and anything with a temperature above absolute zero is emitting IR to some degree) and then the missile flies a suitable course towards the image....amongst other that increases the resistance to being decoyed by flares and perhaps (rumour) even the ability to select a vulnerable bit of structure to aim for.
Here's a link to the weather blog of a University of Washington climatologist in which he analyzes the balloon path and how changing altitude into different wind directions could have steered it.
https://cliffmass.********.com/
https://cliffmass.********.com/
Reporting is that an AIM-9X was employed. Most air-to-air missiles fuse on proximity rather than contact. From the video, it was very effective in nearly instantaneously destroying the envelope. A gun run would have made a lot of holes in the envelope, but maybe not drop the payload where assets were deployed to recover it, plus the hazard of the interceptor colliding with the target. Seems to me that they made the right weapon choice.
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