
Google Loon balloon crashes near Yakima - gregholmberg
http://blogs.seattletimes.com/brierdudley/2014/05/30/google-loon-balloon-crashes-near-yakima/
======
gregholmberg
In the 90s, I would sometimes trip over ethernet cables that had been strung
between server racks, across an aisle.

Will this be the decade where I get to experience being struck by falling
routers and switches, far from any data center?

(EDIT: Simply remarking on novelty of problem and upward growth of network. No
criticism of any firm implied or intended.)

~~~
robin_reala
I took down an AS/400 server once by tripping over two Type 1 token ring
cables[1] that had been plugged together in the middle of a walkway. No-one
ever owned up to that setup.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_hermaphroditic_connect...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_hermaphroditic_connector.JPG)

~~~
jgrahamc
Given that it was token ring that might have isolated the AS/400 but the MAU
would have healed the ring and everything would have been fine.

~~~
robin_reala
Oh god, I’d blocked from my mind the pain of ring dropping. We had MAUs for
the servers, but for some reason ran the rest of the office on CAT-5 TR gear
from Madge without any MAUs. Just took someone to unplug and that section of
the office would lose network connectivity.

~~~
jgrahamc
:-)

I used to work for Madge. Why were you running without MAUs?

~~~
robin_reala
Possibly the more important question is ‘Why were you running a token ring
network in 1999?’! I have no idea why our network was structured like that,
this was my first job in the industry and I was a lowly PC tech at the time.
If I had to guess, the word that springs to mind is ‘legacy’.

~~~
incision
_> 'Possibly the more important question is ‘Why were you running a token ring
network in 1999?’!'_

I've worked on a token ring network as recently as 2006. Thankfully, part of
the project was migrating off of it.

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kordless
The word 'crashes' could easily be substituted with 'drifted into'.

~~~
gregholmberg
Dropping at 2000 feet per minute is not quite free fall, but it's a long way
from a drifting dandelion seed. I wonder if the balloon payload left a crater.

~~~
stilldavid
I've launched a handful of latex weather balloons to near-space. They all
descend on a parachute and have a target impact velocity of ~2000 feet per
minute. None have made so much as a dent in the earth so far.

~~~
gregholmberg
I believe you. :)

I have no experience with balloons at all, but even a plowed field feels like
a sidewalk to me when _I_ run into it at the same speed under canopy. I leave
a sizable mark, and I have seen friends break femurs, pelvises, etc at the end
of a similar descent.

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kidcoach
I grew up outside of Yakima. Northern/Eastern Washington State has some very
desolate places, maybe that area will be the actual user testing ground too.

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lotsofmangos
There is something almost poetic in this. The perils of accidental
infrastructural intercourse.

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gregholmberg
What do the Loon components look like up close? Here's a gallery showing the
solar panels, avionics bay with covers open, and some staffers.

[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/gallery/2013/jun/16/go...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/gallery/2013/jun/16/google-
project-loon-wi-fi-balloons-pictures)

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ibrad
I would still go for cables on the ground ... or underground.

~~~
sukuriant
There are definitely advantages to being completely wireless, building permits
being one of them.

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slm_HN
I like that the article referred to it as a trial balloon.

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pcvarmint
Time for Bale Breaker Field 41 :)

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tim333
Guess that's a hazzard of balloons all over the place. Hope one does not take
out a jet.

~~~
Sanddancer
Balloons are launched all the time, Google's balloons are no different than
the many many weather balloons, etc everyday. Their regulations are pretty
easy [1] to find and follow. Basically, you call them, let them know when and
where it's going up, when and where it's going down, and they'll put out a
notice that pilots look at letting them know that there's a balloon out there
they should look out for. If it gets loose, you call them again, say where you
think it's going, etc, and they'll update the notifications accordingly. Stuff
like this has been handled for a very long time.

[1]
[http://www.chem.hawaii.edu/uham/part101.html](http://www.chem.hawaii.edu/uham/part101.html)

~~~
utopkara
Indeed they are launched all the time. But, we are talking about the case that
the practice becomes popular and the skies become a dense minefield.

~~~
jacquesm
That's an interesting back of the envelope question to work out. Something
with volume occupied by all aircraft aloft at any given moment, volume of all
balloons at any given moment, the total volume of the shell in which
commercial air traffic takes place.

I think we can safely forget about the chances of spyplanes hitting balloons,
the volume of space versus the number of spyplanes would make that a non-
issue, even if there were a lot more balloons.

So 35000 feet (11 km give or take) would be a reasonable upper limit. Let's
assume the worst and start from 0, you have a shell above the earths surface
up to 11 km above it, which has an approximate volume of: 510.1 million km x
11 = 5610 million cubic kilometers.

That's a lot of space. Every cubic kilometer is 10^9 cubic meters, so
5.6x10^18 cubic meters.

I don't know how many aircraft are typically aloft, but let's say it's 20,000
craft and they're all of the very largest variety (say A380, or Boeing
dreamliner). They're approximately 60 meters long, and 6 meter in diameter, so
that's 1700 cubic meters, let's double that to include the wing volume, so
3400 cubic meters.

We have 20,000 of them, they're all aloft at the same time, so all the planes
take up approximately 68,000,000 cubic meters.

Now for the balloons, they're 10 meters in diameter, worst case they are 50
meters high or so (instrument package dangling below the balloon, assuming a
cylinder with a radius of 5 meters and a height of 50), so about 4000 cubic
meters. ('assume a spherical cow of uniform density').

So how big is the chance that _one_ balloon intersects in all of space with
the volume of _all_ the aircraft given that both have all of the atmosphere to
play cat and mouse in?

68,000,000 / (5.6x10^18) = 0.000000000012 (the chance that any given cubic
meter is part of the space occupied by an aircraft) multiplied by 4000 (the
number of cubic meters in a balloon) is about 0.000000048. So that's pretty
small but non-zero, multiply by the number of balloons aloft at any given
time, but keep in mind that most of the factors here were taken very
pessimistic (as in, favouring the collision). The calculation also totally
ignores the relative speeds of the two types of vehicles, ascent speed of
balloons, the time factor, ability to manoeuvre and so on.

See also:

[http://weatherjackwilliams.com/answers-weather-balloons-
and-...](http://weatherjackwilliams.com/answers-weather-balloons-and-
airplanes/)

edit: extensively edited after avoid3d spotted a crucial error in the math, I
had dropped 6 orders of magnitude.

~~~
falcolas
The problem is that jetliners don't have all that space you calculated to play
around in. They actually have a few well defined corridors and altitudes in
which they can operate - the straight lines drawn from one VOR (effectively
equivalent to a major airport) to another at 1,000 foot intervals.

Detours are costly due to time and coordination (air traffic control, other
aircraft), and reacting to seeing a balloon and moving the aircraft isn't that
easy when you're traveling at 300+ MPH in an aircraft which turns like a cargo
ship. And that's assuming you can even see the balloon in time to react in the
first place.

And that's just the commercial jetliners. Private jets go higher and faster
(about 50,000' and 700mph), while GA aircraft fill the skys below 14,000'.

Granted, this still leaves a lot of room in between these major aircraft
corridors, but if a balloon should ever intersect with one of them, it's going
to cause havoc, even if there's never an actual balloon/aircraft incident.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> They actually have a few well defined corridors and altitudes in which they
> can operate - the straight lines drawn from one VOR (effectively equivalent
> to a major airport) to another at 1,000 foot intervals.

Until NextGen (ADS, etc) finishes its rollout and everyone flies direct
instead of on Victor airways and VOR to VOR.

~~~
falcolas
True, but even then there will still result in "air highways" from airport to
airport.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I would agree with this. Still, the number of "air highways" would increase
drastically.

