A runaway weather balloon, which is threatening civil aviation, entered and left Icelandic air space yesterday after defying efforts by aircraft from three nations to track it and shoot it down.
The 300-ft helium-filled balloon drifted across Canada, the North Atlantic, and into British airspace on Saturday, forcing air traffic controllers to divert transatlantic flights. The US military at the Keflavik base in Iceland has now abandoned the search for the balloon, which is believed to be drifting north of Iceland. Observers said it was a matter of time before it would reappear on radar screens somewhere, providing it stayed aloft.
The balloon, which if deflated would cover an area equal to five football fields, was measuring ozone levels when it broke out of control after its launch last Monday from a site near Saskatoon, in western Canada.
"On the basis of prevailing wind conditions and estimates of the balloon's course, some time later this afternoon it should arch back towards the south and enter Norway's air space," said Lieut Carla McCarthy, of the US air base at Keflavik. "Our search went over 300 miles beyond the area that the military is responsible for and at this point there is nothing more we can do," she said. "The radar they were using was for surface searching and they weren't able to detect the balloon in the air." She added that, given prevailing winds, it might soon be in Norwegian air space.
Two Canadian CF-18 fighters fired more than 1,000 cannon rounds at it off the coast of Newfoundland on Thursday. Earlier in the day two RAF Nimrod aircraft had shadowed the balloon before a US Orion plane took up the chase.
A Canadian military spokesman, Lieut Steve Willis, said they were not embarrassed by their pilots' failure to hit the balloon. "Our pilots are tops," he told BBC radio, adding that Canadian CF-18 pilots had won the Top Gun trophy in the US last year as the world's best fighter pilots. "With something like this, which is stationary in the air when the CF18s are flying very, very fast, it is difficult to shoot it," he said.
Britain's Civil Aviation Authority reported delays in transatlantic traffic as airliners were forced to divert from their flight paths.
"We expect it to cross into Norwegian air space at around midnight about 200 miles south-west of Spitzbergen," Mr Oeystein Kroghseter, controller at Bodoe, Norway, said. "We do not expect it to come over land for a few days. We have been told by Icelandic air controllers that the balloon has a flying time of a few more days, judging by the amount and temperature of the gas in it," he said.
The Norwegian air force said it had no immediate plans to take any action. "Maybe it will soon move out of Norwegian airspace," a spokesman said.