Aeronautics

Published on : 12/02/2023 – 06:59

An unidentified object flying over Canada was shot down Saturday (February 11) by a US plane, as part of a joint operation between Washington and Ottawa, marking a new incident since the downing of a supposed Chinese spy balloon last week.

Justin Trudeau announced on Saturday that an “unidentified object” was shot down while flying over the northwest of the country, the day after the United States downed an object flying over Alaska .

Planes from both countries were dispatched to the scene, and the firing of an AIM 9X missile from an American F-22 hit its target, said Justin Trudeau.

US President Joe Biden had authorized the aircraft, one of the aircraft of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), to “work with Canada”, explained the spokesman of the Pentagon, Pat Ryder.

The neutralization of the object was validated by Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau “for the sake of caution and on the recommendation of their armed forces”, said a press release from the White House.

Canadian forces “will now recover and analyze the debris of the object,” added the Canadian Prime Minister.

The craft, which was flying at an altitude of about “40,000 feet” (12,200 meters), “had illegally entered Canadian airspace and posed a (possible) threat to the safety of civilian flight,” said to the press the Minister of National Defense of Canada, Anita Anand.

The object was shot down “about 100 miles (160 km, editor’s note) from the Canada-US border” around 8:40 p.m. GMT, she added.

“We (the) detected together and (the) defeated together” within the framework of NORAD, specified Anita Anand.

It was a “cylindrical device” smaller than the balloon destroyed in North Carolina last week, said the Canadian Minister of Defense.

“For the moment, we are continuing the analyzes of the object, so it would not be prudent on my part to speculate on its origin”, she added, before thanking the Pentagon and the members of the Canadian armies and American for their cooperation.

Earlier in the afternoon, Anita Anand, had claimed on Twitter to have exchanged with her American counterpart, the Secretary of Defense of the United States, Lloyd Austin, reaffirming that “we will always defend our sovereignty together”.

Radar anomaly and spy balloon

Also on Saturday evening, a fighter jet was dispatched to investigate a “radar anomaly” over the US state of Montana, the US military said.

“This plane did not identify any object (allowing) to correlate the radar echoes,” said NORAD and the US Northern Command, adding to continue “to monitor the situation”.

Airspace in the northwestern United States territory had been temporarily closed “to support Department of Defense operations. The airspace has been reopened,” the US aviation regulator said Saturday night. civilian (FAA).

Justin Trudeau spoke to Joe Biden about the downed target over the Yukon, a territory in northwestern Canada bordering Alaska where US forces destroyed another flying object on Friday. “The size of a small car”, it posed “a threat to air traffic safety”, according to John Kirby, spokesman for the White House National Security Council.

It is therefore the second flying object shot down over North America by the United States in about 24 hours.

Search and recovery operations for the remains of the object destroyed on Friday continued on Saturday but were hampered by “cooling Arctic air, snow and limited daylight”, the Command said. North American in a statement, adding that the Pentagon could not provide “any further details (…) on the object, including its capabilities, purpose or origin”.

These incidents come a week after Washington destroyed a balloon off its Atlantic coast, which had flown over sensitive military sites and had been described by Beijing as a “civilian aircraft used for research purposes, mainly meteorological”.

Footage captured by US military aircraft shows that the Chinese balloon that flew over the United States last week was well equipped with spy tools and not intended for weather forecasting.

This diplomatic clash had led the head of American diplomacy Antony Blinken to postpone a rare visit to China.

The American authorities are still busy collecting the debris from the balloon in the Atlantic, near the coast of South Carolina.

With AFP