Last October, a Defense Department tethered radar blimp broke loose of its moorings near Baltimore and drifted across two states—taking out power lines as it dragged its tether cable behind it in a 13-hour, unguided flight.
A new investigation into the incident has revealed that most of the damage could have been avoided. The aerostat—half of the pair used by the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor (JLENS) System—would have come down without causing nearly as much damage if someone had remembered to install its batteries....Each aerostat was equipped with an automatic deflation system to bring the giant floating sensor to the ground quickly in the event of a cable break.
But the system's batteries had not been installed at the time of the accident, so the system failed to activate when main power was lost.
The report, a summary of which was obtained by the Los Angeles Times, found that "design, human, and procedural issues all contributed" to the aerostat breaking loose, disrupting air traffic and causing jets to be scrambled to track its progress..."
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