US aviation authorities on Saturday closed down three airports in the eastern part of the country due to a “national security effort” amid controversy over a suspected Chinese spy balloon in US skies.Arrivals and departures were paused at three airports in the states of South and North Carolina “to support the Department of Defense in a national security effort,” the Federal Aviation Administration told AFP in a statement.
A US fighter jet on Saturday shot down a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina, the Pentagon said, over what it called Beijing’s “unacceptable violation” of American sovereignty.
The craft spent several days flying over North America, ratcheting up tensions between Washington and Beijing, before it was targeted with a missile shot from an F-22 plane, Pentagon officials said, falling into relatively shallow water just 47 feet (14 meters) deep.
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin called the operation a “deliberate and lawful action” that came in response to China’s “unacceptable violation of our sovereignty.”
Designed in the late 1960s to meet demand for mass travel, the world’s first twin-aisle wide-body jetliner’s nose and upper deck became the world’s most luxurious club above the clouds. But it was in the seemingly endless rows at the back of the new jumbo that the 747 transformed travel. “This was THE airplane that introduced flying for the middle class in the U.S.,” said Air France-KLM CEO Ben Smith.
Saturday afternoon was the military’s first chance to take on the balloon “in a way that would not pose a threat to the safety of Americans,” a senior defense official told reporters, while still allowing authorities to collect the fallen debris from US territorial waters.
In eyewitness video posted to social media, the balloon appeared to disintegrate in a white puff before its remnants dropped vertically into the ocean below. Twitter user Haley Walsh posted that she “heard and felt the explosion” in Myrtle Beach, a popular resort town in South Carolina.
President Joe Biden, who earlier Saturday had promised “to take care” of the balloon, congratulated the fighter pilots involved. “They successfully took it down. And I want to compliment our aviators who did it,” Biden told reporters in Maryland.
