The £100 hobby that’s putting the world’s militaries on edge

The field outside John Laidler’s house in Devon is not, from the perspective of a hobby balloonist, ideal. ‘There are telephone wires, big pylons,’ says Laidler, 71, pointing them out, ‘and trees.’ A trifecta of trouble for take-off.

So when his delicate helium-inflated plastic globes – just 3 or 4ft across, trailing 10 yards of hair-thin wire antenna and bearing a fragile 2g payload of GPS, radio transmitter and microprocessor, all powered by a minuscule solar array – begin slowly to ascend and eventually clear the trio of obstacles, his overwhelming feeling is not sadness that he will never see them again, but relief.

‘Launch can be very fraught, you just have to let it go and hope it avoids everything,’ he says, recalling the moment last summer when, having painstakingly prepared his balloon, a gust of wind buffeted it to the ground. ‘Something went wrong,’ says Laidler. ‘I could see as soon as I logged on to track it, it got up to around 2,000m [6,561ft] but soon was coming down. I lost track of it around Exeter. But I’m in good company, there is a high failure rate. Pico balloons are very fragile.’

So fragile, in fact, that a mere flutter of turbulence, from an aircraft or passing weather system, can consign them to their doom. What their featherweight components (costing perhaps £100) certainly can’t withstand is a £337,000 AIM-9X Sidewinder missile, capable of propelling a 21lb warhead at two and a half times the speed of sound. And yet it is a Sidewinder, fired from a US Air Force F-22 stealth jet, that seems to have accounted for Balloon K9YO, launched the previous October by Cary Willis and fellow members, some no more than children, of the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB).

On 10 February, there it was, this plucky little balloon that could, reporting its position just off the south-west corner of Alaska, at an altitude of 38,000ft, set on a trajectory to drift over the Yukon. And yet on 11 February, after the Pentagon unleashed its might against ‘unidentified flying objects’ in the very same area, there it most certainly wasn’t.

The NIBBB gave it a few days, but eventually declared its craft missing in action. Given that no wreckage was recovered, no one can be certain of what happened. But, as one NIBBB member said afterwards, ‘We know where the balloon was off the coast of Alaska. We know where it was, if all was well… We know that it didn’t wake up that morning. We know [the American forces] shot something down.’

For K9YO it may well have been a case of wrong place, wrong time. It was aloft on the fringes of US airspace just days after a Chinese ‘weather’ balloon, possibly freighted with espionage equipment, had caused a national security panic in Washington, DC. The Chinese balloon was shot down on 4 February, to be followed in subsequent days by three other objects, probably including K9YO, all of which proved much less concerning. In normal times, the little balloon would surely have been left unmolested to continue its seventh circumnavigation of the globe.

For that, astonishingly, is the potential range of these cheap, flimsy bits of kit, sent up by hobbyists young and old to drift on the global zephyrs, using tiny amounts of power and sending back – like early space probes drifting billions of miles from their launchpad – fragments of information, confirming not much more than their position and the fact that they live to fly another day.

For Laidler, who spent 30 years in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, rising to the rank of Lt-Col, ‘It’s technically interesting that something so weak can broadcast so far. And for next to no cost. What you do need to expend is patience to put it all together. It’s a challenge. But when you do it right the balloon comes alive! It’s fascinating.’

He shows me the essentials of the pico balloonists’ trade. The envelope itself resembles nothing so much as a large, clear plastic bag, the kind of thing in which a dry-cleaner might encase a laundered jacket: ‘50p’ says Laidler, ticking off the costs, though more expensive silvered versions are available, for up to £30. Then there are the tiny electronics, to take the balloon’s position and beam it back to earth. ‘£50,’ he says, ‘ordered from a website in Turkey.’ The solar array? ‘£10 for 50 cells. Six generate 3.3 volts, which is enough to power the processor.’ The long wire to serve as an antenna? ‘Pennies!’ And finally the gas to inflate the thing. This, it turns out, can be the most expensive component of all, depending on the balloon. For so-called ‘poppers’, which ascend vertically to the edge of space before exploding as the atmosphere thins and floating down to the ground on a parachute, as much as £70 worth – ‘three party-balloon canisters’ – of helium is required.

Laidler’s first balloon adventure, the fruit of lockdown dedication to a new hobby, was just such a ‘popper’, launched on 9 August 2020. It reached 31,858m (104,521ft) – about three times the cruising altitude of a commercial airliner. ‘I wanted to get to 100,000ft and I got that,’ he says. The pictures his craft periodically sent back reveal first Plymouth, then Devon’s western coast, the whole of the Jurassic coast, higher and higher, until suddenly the curvature of the earth hoves into view.

But having gone high, next Laidler wanted to go far. And for that he needed to build a pico balloon like K9YO.

Unlike poppers, pico balloons rise steadily until they plateau – usually around 41,000ft – and get carried along on prevailing winds. With a bit of luck, they can last as long as a year, repeatedly circling the globe. ‘The record is 15 laps around the world,’ says Laidler. With its stretched canopy and solar array, the Chinese weather/spy balloon was just such a craft, if much larger. The significant difference was its payload – which, suggests Justin Bronk, an air-warfare specialist at the Royal United Service Institute, was probably electronics to pick up radar and communications. ‘Sig Int’ in the jargon.

John Laidler’s first pico balloon did not even carry a camera. Every gram counts in this business. On a still spring day in 2021 (low winds are essential for launch), he set it adrift. Soon it reached around 26,000ft, floating through France, over the Mediterranean, into North Africa and then… Every pico balloonist must face communication blackouts. But then the sun comes up, the solar array generates a minuscule trickle of power, and the balloon checks in.

Usually. Before it likely met its end at the point of a Sidewinder missile, K9YO had once been silent for more than a month, the winter sun too weak to fire its comms kit. Then it finally broadcast its position. Laidler was not so lucky. ‘When I got up one day there was nothing,’ he recalls of his first pico balloon. ‘And that’s the thing, you just never see these things again.’

He is aware that this means he is committing an ‘act of long-range littering’. There is nothing he can do about that. So he performs a ‘litter offset’ – patrolling the lane outside his cottage. He finds that for every gram he sends up, he can easily collect kilos of junk back on the ground.

But it does beg the question, how much else is up there? The answer, says Bronk, is ‘not an enormous amount’. There is, of course, the military kit, like China’s alleged spy balloon. Conflicts from Afghanistan to Ukraine have shown the usefulness of balloons’ ‘loitering capabilities’, staying in the air for long periods. Last month, the Ministry of Defence confirmed it is spending £100 million on ‘Project Aether’ to test and deploy a fleet of balloons, which a spokesman said will conduct ‘intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and rebroadcast activities over an ultra-wide area’.

But as for hobbyists, well, in the UK amateur meteorologists dispatch perhaps a dozen or two weather balloons each week and they, like pico balloonists, must give the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) 28 days’ notice. The CAA will then put out a Notice to Aviation (NOTAM) to alert pilots nearby.

As pre-launch requirements go, it doesn’t sound too onerous. But then Laidler runs me through the other hurdles to launch legally in Britain. Chief among these is the Trials and Development Licence from Ofcom, required to operate the balloon’s transmitter. Then there’s insurance, just in case. Membership of the British Model Flying Association happens to bring the benefit of such insurance – ‘though only up to £25 million, so it won’t cover a jumbo jet’, chuckles Laidler. But hang on: these balloons can’t damage an airliner, can they? Not the picos, reckons Laidler, weighing so much less than a bird. And the poppers, which require three AA batteries? Laidler sucks his teeth. The engineer in him is not too keen on the idea of chucking batteries into a whirring jet engine. But what are the chances?

One of the other exams Laidler has had to pass is his ham radio qualification from the Radio Society of Great Britain, which allows him to broadcast signals around the world and, crucially, to pick up the whisper-frail messages broadcast by pico balloons. And what these reveal is that around the globe there are just a dozen or so pico balloons in the air at any one time. From his time on message boards, Laidler reckons ‘there are perhaps a few hundred of us’, mostly in Europe and America, but some in Australia and the Far East.

He enjoys the freewheeling spirit of this tiny global community, the flying and tracking done by amateurs for amateurs. (‘Look,’ he says, ‘there’s Dave, from Canada. He’s famous.’ Relatively speaking, I assume.) Laidler flicks out a morse code message into the ether, and soon the ether pings back a reply. It feels delightfully off-grid, for all the regulation.

This patchwork community of hobbyists is a far cry from the professionals manning the sophisticated tracking systems of international intelligence services. But then, one wonders, how come a giant Chinese balloon managed to take the globe’s pre-eminent military power by surprise? It turns out, being slow is stealthy. To filter out what’s unimportant, early warning systems are ‘tuned’ to focus on fast-moving objects – the jets, bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

‘There is a genuine physics problem of picking up slow things without also picking up clutter – like a flock of seagulls,’ says Bronk. Or pico balloons. In the aftermath of the Chinese balloon, it is plausible that US radar was ‘retuned’. Suddenly a host of unusual objects would have appeared on military screens. In the next few days three such blips, all innocent, and probably including K9YO, were shot down. So while there may not be huge amounts of stuff up there, the problem, says Bronk, ‘is that we don’t know exactly what most of it is. We don’t have systems for determining that in any sort of efficient way.’

The problem is not easily solved. One option is simply to go up and take a look. But balloons can operate at extreme altitudes, where even military aircraft can struggle. The Pentagon had to dispatch a U2 spy plane, famously high-flying, to recon the China balloon. And even its altitude ceiling is 70,000ft, well below what Laidler achieved with his very first ‘popper’.

So will jittery governments clamp down on balloonists’ fun? Analysts think not. Instead, enthusiasts worldwide may be required to provide more details of their flights, like the NOTAMs system in Britain. And before dispatching Sidewinder-laden F-22s, governments will doubtless learn to take a peek at the hobbyists’ own freely available tracking websites, just to make sure they’re not going on red alert for what is, essentially, a party balloon.

‘After the Chinese balloon there was a feeling in the pico community that we should keep below the radar,’ Laidler says. ‘So we’ll let the dust settle a bit.’ At the time of writing, there were no pico balloons above the UK.

But Laidler is not giving up. He is already planning his next flight, scheduled for this summer.

‘I want to circumnavigate the globe,’ he says. ‘That’s the ambition. [Richard] Branson spent millions trying to get a balloon round the world. I want to do it for £25.’