The massive balloons that have made drug smuggling by plane nearly extinct
by Anna Giaritelli
August 26, 2019 12:00 AM 
RIO GRANDE CITY, Texas — It was just another Monday in 2001 when a few of the country’s top national security officials gathered inside the Pentagon to discuss taking all the air out of a program that used balloons for surveillance near the U.S.-Mexico border.
The goal of the gathering was to push TARS, or Tethered Aerostat Radar Systems, comparable in appearance to unmanned stationary blimps but containing top-of-the-line airplane detectors, onto another department's shoulders. That day, the Air Force, which had overseen TARS since 1992, washed its hands of it, not caring if the program came to an end.
The next morning, 19 terrorists hijacked four U.S. commercial airplanes and turned off the aircrafts' transponders. The only way the government was able to track those flights was by using air radars: the same types of radars flying inside the balloons on the southwest border.
“That situation heightened the vulnerability and the security concern against air, and there was no more talk of terminating TARS from that point forward,†explains Rob Brown, a senior official within U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Air and Marine Operations component.
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