Yesterday my flight tracking system picked up high altitude balloon HBAL728 west of Tampa, FL in Gulf of Mexico.
Not finding a lot of info on its purpose. Any ideas?
I see the same balloon now at 67k feet just outside of 150nm from me in the same vicinity as your track. Pretty much West of Tampa/Clearwater.
Some info on that one:
You think that’s high.. they launched this one here last week. The trackers stopped showing it past about 65.
I’ve seen up to 6 Aerostar high altitude balloons at one time wandering over the US. It’s very common. Last year we had one get “stuck” over OK for 4 days before the steering winds moved it along. It was @ 68,000 feet.
We also get to track the low altitude balloon races out of Albuquerque every year as the wind pushes them over OK on their way East.
It’s 12:21 on April 30th and I currently see it on the map being tracked in roughly the same location at 61000 ft, supposedly moving at 4kts. When I try to view the flight path, it never loads, but other flights load in seconds. Likely unrelated to anything but who knows.
It seems to be travelling a lot lately looking at FA’s map today:
I did got a short flight path track when I was picking it up. Its transmissions might be spotty enough to make real time tracking a problem.
BTW, a link to FA tracking page on it: https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/N258TH
. Sorry for the fuzzy pic. I see these all the time.