Comments by "afcgeo" (@afcgeo882) on "Defending American Skies" video.

  1. The gap in our air defense system doesn’t refer to a spacial gap. It refers to the fact that our radars were specifically tuned to search for and track airplanes and missiles, all of which move at fairly high speeds. Since balloons were never a threat, the tech simply wasn’t calibrated to include slow-moving objects. The Chinese balloon in question was easy to spot because of its size, and the decision was finally made to recalibrate the system to include slow moving objects as well. That likely caused us to find the other, smaller balloons.
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  2. There are no spacial gaps as the system is regularly tested with our own and NATO aircraft.
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  3. Time to put the tin foil had back on!
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  4. Yes, but that was our own weather balloon that was drifting toward Russia. Also, we failed at bringing it down. It ended up entering Russian territory and splashing down in the Arctic Ocean near Russian shore.
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  5. They constantly do.
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  6.  @reubs91  Some bureaucrat named the CINC.
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  7. NORAD doesn’t shoot things down.
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  8. No, each one received Presidential-level approval.
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  9.  @janetyeoman1544  You heard wrong. The balloon was only engaged by Canadian VF-18s, never USAF or the RAF and while it did briefly enter British airspace, it then drifted north into Icelandic airspace. It never got anywhere near Finland. it actually drifted into Russian airspace and went down over the Arctic Ocean, north of Russia’s northern coast. It was a Canadian weather balloon, so no other nation needed to engage it.
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  10. When it comes to NORAD? Yes. Otherwise… Hawaii is crucial to the country because that’s where Dole Whip comes from.
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  11. We had very primitive radars, but no system.
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  12. Actually, the adjustments were very quickly made, within hours, and NORAD doesn’t use a single radar system. That would be silly. The issue was never the radars tracking objects. They did that well. The issue was the flagging and identification of objects. The system was never made to identify and flag very slow moving objects. We know the exact flight path the balloons took because the system did record them. It just didn’t see them as threats. By “system” I don’t just mean radars or computers. I mean as a whole, including humans.
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  13.  @carey-gregory  Perhaps YOU should research that topic better as NORAD is a giant part of NATO’s strategic defenses and NATO aircraft often do test it, on purpose. NORAD’s radars aren’t in Colorado. They’re not all in the US either. Most are in Europe, Canada and Greenland.
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  14. Yeah, closer to 80%.
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