Official: Could take days or weeks to remove wayward blimp
An unmanned Army surveillance blimp which broke loose from its ground tether in Maryland floats through the air about 1,000 feet about the ground while dragging a several thousand foot tether line just south of Millville, Wednesday.
An unmanned Army surveillance blimp floats through the air while dragging a tether line just south of Millville on Wednesday.
MUNCY (AP) – A military official says it will take days, maybe weeks, to remove a surveillance blimp that broke loose in Maryland before coming down into trees in the Pennsylvania countryside.
U.S. Army Captain Matthew Villa says the blimp is in two “mostly intact” pieces. The main body and the tail section are a few hundred meters apart.
He says the wreckage is in trees along a ravine in a hard-to-access area. He spoke at a briefing Thursday morning, a day after the 240-foot helium-filled blimp came to a rest near Muncy.
Villa says the “hows and whys” of what happened are under investigation.
The blimp, fitted with sensitive defense technology, escaped from Aberdeen Proving Ground. Its dangling tether caused power outages in Pennsylvania before it hit the ground.