It would be like having an aircraft carrier in your harbor.
Posted on 08/10/2012 12:49:01 PM PDT by To-Whose-Benefit?
August 09, 2012|Breaking News Desk, Inquirer staff writer
The Army has followed the Navy in testing a new generation of blimps at the New Jersey military base where the Hindenberg infamously burst into flames in 1937.
The Army's $517 million spy blimp - a high-altitude observation platform, according to the manufacturer - had its maiden flight Tuesday at Ocean County's Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst. (See video: http://ow.ly/cRi5E.)
The Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle, a 302-foot dirigible, can be manned or remote-controlled, according to Northrop Grumman.
For months, the Navy's MZ-3A, a manned 178-footer, has caught the eyes of folks from Philadelphia's suburbs to the Jersey Shore.
Such airships are of military interest because they can stay aloft for long periods and land without runways.
An unmanned 370-foot-long Air Force airship was canceled this year because of cost and technological reasons. It was hangared in North Carolina, when it was ordered dismantled in June.
The Army's helium-filled airship is 100 feet longer than the Goodyear Blimp.
Edward J. Colimore and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
It's 300 feet long. WHO are they going to Spy on with it?
If the people this Spy BLIMP was going to spy on were really hostiles who needed to be spied on, they could easily shoot it down.
It never quits. It just Never quits.
US citizens cannot shoot anything down. It will be used on us.
I wonder how it holds station. Winds aloft can get brisk.
I wonder if this is the same lighter-than-air craft that was spotted by a FReeper two or three years ago at a Lockheed facility in SoCal.
There were a few pictures back then; kind of looked like three Goodyear blimps fused together side-by-side. The pictures looked like they were taken through a fence.
after you have air superiority over a battlefield, they might be useful - but that sounds like WWI or II, not the battles present military thinking expects; that thinking could be wrong, or is this another case of the conjunction of crony-capitalism and the DOD & Congress
Krauthammer on drones :
“I’m going to go hard left on you here, I’m going ACLU. I don’t want regulations, I don’t want restrictions, I want a ban on this. Drones are instruments of war. The Founders had a great aversion to any instruments of war, the use of the military inside even the United States. It didn’t like standing armies, it has all kinds of statutes of using the army in the country.
A drone is a high-tech version of an old army and a musket. It ought to be used in Somalia to hunt bad guys but not in America. I don’t want to see it hovering over anybody’s home. Yes, you can say we have satellites, we’ve got Google Street View and London has a camera on every street corner but that’s not an excuse to cave in on everything else and accept a society where you’re always under — being watched by the government. This is not what we want.
I would say that you ban it under all circumstances and I would predict, I’m not encouraging, but I an predicting that the first guy who uses a Second Amendment weapon to bring a drone down that’s been hovering over his house is going to be a folk hero in this country.”
“It’s 300 feet long. WHO are they going to Spy on with it?”
Helen Keller, Stevie Wonder & Ray Charles?
We need every blimp we can get our hands on. Those NAZI Devils must never dare approach our sacred coasts again in their fiendish submersible killing machines. We shall spot them from hundreds of yards aloft, drop depth charges on them, and foil their dastardly plans.
Does that answer your question, Mr. Doubting Thomas?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEIsS_l-v5g
Was it accidentally mistaken for Chris Christie?
No. But they do use one of his old sweatshirts to cover it at night.
Most of us in America don’t store Russian or Chi-Com anti-aircraft missiles in the garage. And if anyone did, launching it from the back yard would summon police of one sort or another.
The people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Govt of Iran etc either have them already or can get them no matter How high an altitude this Spy BLIMP hovers at.
It’s not as if this $517 Million Joke is afraid of a .30-06.
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