Posthip Scott sends me a link to Flightradar24 which shows all the airplanes currently flying. Good golly, there are a bunch of them. And this is since COVID-19 crashed the airline industry.
If we zoom out I'll bet we can make it look like the entire country is carpeted with aircraft. Okay, that's silly, but what are those round icons out in the middle of the Caribbean?
Look, there is a whole bunch of them over Mauritius and Reunion (which is important because I am currently reading The Mauritius Command by Patrick O'Brian).
Click on one of these round icons and I find it's a weather balloon operated by Loon enterprises and when I look them up I find they are competing with Elon Musk and his constellation of Starlink satellites to bring internet to the ends of the Earth. Huh.
So these things are being set adrift in the atmosphere and in short order they drift away. It looks like there are about 16 balloons in the area, and only 3 of them are over the islands, so they must have a fairly high attrition rate. All the components that go into one of these balloons are relatively cheap, but by the time you've got one assembled and launched it has to be at least a small chunk of change. I don't see how it can be a viable business. But maybe Richie Rich is bank rolling the whole deal as a stop gap measure until Starlink becomes fully operational.
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