One of the two tethered aerostats that make up the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System (JLENS), has broken loose from its moorings and is now drifting over Pennsylvania. Two Air National Guard F-16 fighters are monitoring its movements, but the trailing tether has already taken out power lines in Pennsylvania, causing blackouts in Bloomsberg as it got closer to the ground.
JLENS' twin aerostats are (or were) supposed to provide airborne early warning and targeting of low-flying airborne threats coming in from the Atlantic, covering a radius of 300 miles with their look down search and targeting radar. They have been the subject of much controversy because of the cost of the program; a recent Los Angeles Times report called the $2.7 billion dollar project delivered by Raytheon a "zombie" program: "costly, ineffectual and seemingly impossible to kill."
The twin white blimps, visible from Baltimore and much of surrounding Maryland, were tethered at sites in Baltimore County and Harford County near the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground. The Harford County tether, at the Army's Edgewood Arsenal facility, broke today, and the unmanned, unpowered blimp drifted off while trailing 6,700 feet of cable.
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