Dirigibles get the call: Uncle Sam wants you
Friday, May 17, 2002
Shades of Graf Zeppelin, USS Shenandoah and, oh the humanity, the Hindenberg.
Dirigibles -- massive flying machines that went the way of the mammoth a half-century ago -- are being resurrected as high-tech weapons in the war on terror.
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| An artist's concept of a Lockheed Martin high-altitude airship. The new airships will be high-tech weapons in the war on terror. |
Twice as big as a jumbo jet and soaring twice as high, they may soon be deployed to guard Canada and the United States, scanning for intruders on the Pacific Northwest's long coastline and international border.
The U.S. North American Air Defense Command -- NORAD -- in Colorado Springs, Colo., is considering a 21st-century generation of airships to watch for attacks, just as the military blimps from Tillamook, Ore., guarded the coastline and shipping lanes during World War II.
These airships, however, would be based on "lighter-than-air principles (but) would be more analogous to low-altitude satellites," said Maj. Ed Thomas, U.S. Aerospace Command spokesman in Colorado Springs.
The 700- to 800-foot-long dirigibles of the 1930s could soar up to 15,000 feet at nearly 80 mph. Specifications for the new generation of airships remain classified, but modern military planners envision a fleet of 10 remote-control craft. The airships, packed with radar and modern communication gear, could remain aloft for months, patrolling 13 miles above the Earth's surface in the calmest part of the atmosphere.
Satellites, by contrast, are much more expensive and can orbit or be parked thousands of miles above the surface. And unlike satellites, which generally cannot be retrieved except for a special space shuttle mission, airships can land for repairs or to take on new equipment.
"We are looking, from NORAD's perspective, at being able to provide enhanced radar coverage" of the perimeter of the continent, Thomas said. Ground-based radar is limited by the Earth's curvature.
NORAD, working jointly with the Army's space and missile defense command, has solicited design concepts from Lockheed Martin and The Boeing Co. A potential Department of Defense contract looms, though neither estimates nor funding have been developed.
The aerospace industry has been talking about airships for years. In addition to defense implications, high-flying airships might be used for resource management, disaster communications and weather monitoring. A South African concern considered building some in 1997, and last January India announced plans to develop its own. Some German firms have been talking about using modern technology for lighter-than-air cargo carriers.
Lockheed already owns veteran blimp maker Goodyear Aerospace Corp. of Akron, Ohio, and has been making airships since 1929. Lockheed now produces "Aerostats," small, remote-controlled, tethered blimps that float 15,000 feet high and are used to monitor the U.S.-Mexican border. It also builds the manned blimps used as flying billboards.
Boeing on May 2 agreed to work with CargoLifter of Germany to study high-altitude airships for commercial and military purposes. But on Monday, CargoLifter was said to be facing insolvency after failing to find initial funding. Boeing spokesman David Phillips said it remains unclear what that means for the arrangement.
"No deals have been signed and we are fully aware of the financial challenges of a start-up company," Phillips said. "We are discussing a broad number of potential commercial and military defense opportunities with them."
Boeing's Unmanned Systems Group and its innovative PhantomWorks research group are working on the concept, which has roots in technology that has been around since the first airship was built in 1900.
Dirigibles came into vogue in World War I, when the Germans used them as the B-52 bombers of their day. Their hydrogen-filled Zeppelin fleets bombed London -- until the British did them one better by inventing incendiary bullets.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Zeppelins came to be used for quick and luxurious trans-Atlantic passenger travel at more than 100 mph -- the Concorde of the day.
The first U.S. dirigible, the Navy's USS Shenandoah, launched in 1923, was the first rigid-frame airship filled with non-flammable helium. It crashed in a storm in 1925.
The end of the dirigible was foreshadowed in 1937 with an image burned forever into the public mind, as the 804-foot-long Zeppelin Hindenberg burst into flames in Lakehurst, N.J. A traumatized broadcaster witnessing the disaster moaned, "Oh, the humanity."
Though helium replaced flammable hydrogen, airships were eclipsed by always-faster and ever-bigger conventional aircraft, though the U.S. Navy used blimps for long over-water patrols into the 1960s.
There are four kinds of lighter-than-air ships: hot-air balloons; non-rigid blimps that maintain their shape by internal pressure; semi-rigid blimps with a solid keel but pressurized envelope; and rigid airships, or dirigibles such as the Zeppelins, with aluminum frames held aloft by lighter-than-air gas in cells.
The 500-foot-long airships proposed for NORAD "would not be rigid dirigible-type airships. They would have rigid structures to hold surveillance gear and engines, however," said Cary Dell, spokesman for Lockheed-Martin in Akron, Ohio.
"We proposed and first announced in 2000 a high-altitude airship, unmanned, to fly autonomously at 70,000 feet above the jet stream, where you get above a lot of weather. It would be feasible for autonomous platforms up there, with ground controls, to stay on station in a relatively synchronous position," Dell said. NORAD showed interest last year.
Although NORAD wants the new high-altitude airships for radar surveillance, they could eventually hold other systems, said Thomas, the NORAD spokesman.
"It would be a truck, so to speak, that can carry different payloads -- imagery, infrared warning systems, communications and other uses," Thomas said.
Some privacy watchdog groups say lighter-than-air craft could whip up controversy, depending on the nature of the surveillance.
"Radar itself probably doesn't have any privacy implications, but if they start using video cameras and monitoring equipment on the ground, that would be a problem," David Banisar, deputy director of Privacy International, a Washington, D.C., surveillance watchdog group, recently told the Denver Post. "But it all sounds fairly ludicrous right now."