An American fighter aircraft destroys an alleged Chinese surveillance balloon.

A week after it initially entered American airspace and set off a dramatic and public spying story that deteriorated Sino-U.S. ties, a U.S. military fighter aircraft shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina.

Although the Pentagon advised deflating the balloon over open sea to protect civilians from debris falling to Earth from thousands of feet (metres) above commercial air traffic, President Joe Biden claimed to have given the order to do so on Wednesday.

One F-22 fighter plane from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia fired the shot at 2:39 p.m. (1939 GMT) with a lone AIM-9X supersonic, heat-seeking air-to-air missile, according to a senior U.S. military official. Multiple fighter and refuelling aircraft were part in the mission.

China vehemently denounced the military action on an airship that it said was utilised for meteorological and other scientific purposes and that had "totally accidently" wandered into American airspace, claims that were categorically denied by American officials.

According to U.S. officials, the balloon was shot down over relatively shallow water around six nautical miles off the American shore of the Atlantic Ocean. This might help efforts to retrieve pieces of the Chinese spying equipment in the following days.