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 The U.S. military scrambled two armed F-16 fighter jets to keep
watch as the massive blimp traveled into civilian airspace after
coming untethered from its base at Aberdeen Proving Ground, a U.S.
Army facility 40 miles (65 km) northeast of Baltimore.
Pentagon officials said they were unsure why the 242-foot-long blimp
broke free at 12:20 p.m. Military officials wrestled for hours over
the best way to bring it down safely, but eventually it deflated on
its own.
The blimp, part of a $2.8 billion Army program, landed in a rural,
wooded area in Exchange, Pennsylvania, a community outside
Bloomsburg, about 150 miles (240 km) north of the Aberdeen Proving
Ground.
John Thomas, a spokesman for Columbia County emergency management
agency, said there were no reports of injuries but had no more
details about the landing.
 Pennsylvania police and military officials guarded a wide safety
perimeter around the blimp, which settled amid farmland in the
remote area. Residents, including members of an Amish community,
watched them work under steady rainfall.
The blimp's travels caused widespread damage, officials said. At one
point, 30,000 Pennsylvania residents were without power, the
governor's office said.
"The tether attached to the aircraft caused widespread power outages
across Pennsylvania," said a statement from Governor Tom Wolf's
office.
The blimp's travels were a sensation on social media, with hashtags
like #Blimpflood and #Blimpmemes ranking among the top trending
topics. At least two Twitter parody accounts sprung up, gaining
nearly 2,000 followers in just under two hours.
The attention was unlikely to be welcomed by the Army, which calls
the program the Joint Land-Attack Cruise Missile Elevated Netted
Sensor System, or JLENS. The program was restructured after it
overran cost estimates, the Government Accountability Office said in
2014.
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The program is comprised of two blimps, each 242 feet long. The
second blimp will be grounded until the military inspects it and
finishes an investigation into the unmooring, said Navy Captain
Scott Miller, a spokesman for the U.S. military's North American
Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD.
The system itself is still in a testing phase. Manufacturer Raytheon
Co's <RTN.N> website says it would become part of the defenses that
help protect the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area. (Link:
http://rtn.co/1PUJnjY)
Raytheon's website says the blimps are meant to be tethered to the
ground by a "11/8 inch thick super-strong cable," which should
withstand 100 mile-per-hour (60 kph) winds. Electricity runs up the
cable and powers the radar, the website says.
NORAD said the blimp became untethered while at an altitude of 6,600
feet, far below its maximum recommended altitude of up to 10,000
feet.
By early afternoon, it had climbed to 16,000 feet as it traveled
into Pennsylvania.
NORAD said the system was designed to defend against threats beyond
cruise missiles, to include drone aircraft and "surface moving
targets" such as swarming boats and tanks.
(Reporting by Phil Stewart and Yeganeh Torbati in Washington, Joe
McDonald in Exchange, Pennsylvania, Eric M. Johnson in Seattle and
Scott Disavino in New York; Editing by David Gregorio and Paul Tait)
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