In the age of stealth drones and advanced satellites, the presence of a "spy balloon" in American skies is an anachronism, so what was it doing there?

And why spy airships instead of other modern devices?

And what does international law say about this?

Questions that 3 French-language newspapers tried to answer. The Swiss newspaper, Le Temps, attributed to the American expert specializing in surveillance balloons, William Kim, describing the aforementioned Chinese balloon as a tool guided by artificial intelligence, which are powerful monitoring tools that are difficult to overthrow.

According to this expert, satellites are increasingly vulnerable to ground and space attacks, and airships have many advantages, starting with their ability to hide from radar because they are made of non-metallic materials that do not reflect light, so although they can be very large, their detection It is a challenge, but if it is small, it may pass through the air unnoticed.

But could the balloon have arrived in the United States by mistake?

This is what William Kim sees as a “real possibility,” as “these balloons do not always work perfectly,” he says, noting that the Chinese device flew about 14,000 meters above the ground, compared to 19,000 to 30,000 meters that usually Fly it like this kind of device.

Although the US army has now shot down this balloon, William Kim pointed out that this task is not easy. In 1998, the Canadian Air Force sent an F-18 fighter plane to try to shoot down a weather balloon that was considered out of control, and was unable to. It was only able to be dropped after it was rained with a thousand 20 mm bullets, and it took 6 days before it fell completely.

In turn, the French newspaper Le Figaro stated that the use of intercontinental airships at high altitudes to spy or carry out an attack is not new, noting that Japanese scientists were the first to use them for military purposes in 1944, according to the scientific and technological magazine Popular Mechanics. They were used to drop incendiary bombs, and were also exploited during the Cold War to gather information about the adversary, particularly in the context of ballistic arsenals.

The newspaper said that these balloons have advantages over satellites, as they are more capable of moving in low orbit and geostationary orbit, as those satellites rotate according to the Earth's rhythm but focus only on a specific point, not to mention that these balloons can be fixed in a specific place. So you gather what you observe relatively slowly.


As for the French newspaper La Croix, it focused on the legal aspect of what happened between the United States and China, saying that international law and American law do not allow such devices to enter the airspace of a country without its consent, and failure to do so is a violation of the sovereignty of that country.

US laws also stipulate that “the United States government has exclusive sovereignty” over its airspace, and that aircraft of the armed forces of foreign countries cannot cross US airspace without the written approval of the US Secretary of State.

Lacroix explained that the fact that the airship is just a flying bird does not change anything in the matter, as according to Article 8 of the Chicago Convention of 1944 (amended in 1984), “no aircraft capable of flying without a pilot may fly over the territory of one of the contracting states, except under authorization.” special from that country and according to its terms.” In such a case, the country may decide to drop such an object if it is a device with a military purpose, according to La Croix.