“I told them to shoot it down,” President Biden told reporters in Hagerstown, Md., on his way to Camp David on Saturday afternoon. “They said to me, let’s wait until the safest place to do it.”
Per Pentagon officials on Saturday, February 4th at approximately 2:40 p.m., some six miles off the coast of South Carolina two American F-22 fighter jets fired a Sidewinder air-to-air missile to down a chinese spy balloon that was traversing across American airspace for the last week at an altitude of 60,000 to 65,000 feet. The F-22s were at 58,000 feet, with more American fighters in support.
The president was alerted by the Pentagon on Tuesday that a spy balloon had entered continental U.S. airspace near Idaho, White House officials said, and asked for military options. By Wednesday, the balloon was hovering over Montana and not only was a full-blown diplomatic crisis underway; Americans from different states uniformly galvanized by demanding the chinese spyballoon to be shot down by our military or the American people would take matters into their own hands.
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President Biden said he ordered the Pentagon to shoot it down on Wednesday, but national security officials were concerned about the damage it could cause and waited until it was over water instead of land.
“They successfully took it down, and I want to compliment our aviators who did it," Biden told reporters on Saturday, as an operation was underway to recover debris from the balloon — which had been floating at an altitude of around 60,000 feet — in the Atlantic Ocean.