Thrill-seeking tourists were feasting their eyes on the picturesque Pink City skyline on board a hot-air balloon off Amber Fort this afternoon. But the Indian Air Force thought that was an unidentified “low, slow moving object” off the Jaipur sky. And so within minutes, the IAF alerted Air Traffic Control in Delhi and Jaipur, got the airspace between Delhi-Jaipur-Udaipur blocked at once and even sent off two Sukhois to bring down this “strange” object.

The confusion began at 2.10 pm on Saturday when the IAF noticed the balloon as a slow-moving object north of Jaipur on its radar and immediately cleared ground for an “interception activity.” While all flights between Delhi-Udaipur sector were put on hold for the next 50 minutes, the Sukhois scrambled for take-off from IAF’s Jodhpur base to intercept and assess whether the object was “friend or foe.”

The Sukhois ended up seeing a harmless hot-air balloon bobbing in the air and the fighter pilots decided that it probably qualified as a friend and returned to base. The entire operation ended at 3 pm. The only company authorised to conduct hot-air ballooning off Jaipur was completely unaware of this action in the sky.

Sky Waltz, the company that launched its hot-air ballooning three months ago, claimed the balloon was on its usual 60-minute flight, permitted to fly up to a height of 1,000 feet and eight nautical miles from the airport.

“We have not heard of any such incident today, even in the last three months since we began this service. This is bizarre. We have full government permissions with civil aviation authority sanctions to conduct balloon flying in Jaipur. We have two hot-air balloons with capacity for 11 passengers operating as of now and we plan to add another one shortly. But we never had any IAF fighters tailing us or anything of the sort. There may have been some illegal balloon in the air and not ours for all you know,”said a rather bewildered Samit Garg, Director E-Factor Adventure Tourism (P) Ltd that launched Sky Waltz with the Rajasthan government.